Breaking! All flights grounded at multiple major U.S. airports!
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On September 21 (local time), the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) halted inbound flights to the three major airports in the New York metropolitan area, as well as airports in Philadelphia, Boston, and other East Coast locations, due to a combination of a telecommunications circuit failure and the accidental severing of a backup fiber-optic cable by a construction crew. This disruption caused thousands of flight delays and cancellations across the country.
Cause of the outage: Failure of an aging circuit and accidental severing of a backup fiber-optic cable
The incident began with a failure in an aging primary communication circuit at the Philadelphia Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON) facility. While attempting to switch to the backup system, personnel discovered that a backup fiber-optic cable in New Jersey had been accidentally severed by a construction crew. This disruption to radio and radar data transmission triggered widespread operational restrictions.
U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy stated on the social media platform X that an Amtrak construction crew in New Jersey accidentally cut a fiber-optic cable, causing a telecommunications outage that forced the FAA to halt flights in the Northeast.
Affected Airports: New York's Major Hubs Lead the List; Restrictions Cascade Across Multiple Hubs
The FAA initially issued ground stops for Philadelphia, Newark, and Teterboro, subsequently extending them to JFK and LaGuardia (LGA); Boston Logan (BOS) also faced brief restrictions due to traffic spillover. Affected airports included smaller facilities such as Teterboro (TEB) in New Jersey and Westchester County Airport in New York, with spillover effects impacting other regional airports-such as San Francisco (SFO)-at certain times.
New York's three major airports-JFK, LaGuardia, and Newark-announced flight delays caused by an FAA equipment failure.
Data from the flight tracking platform FlightAware shows that over 5,600 flights across the U.S. were delayed or canceled, with approximately 1,200 of those flights affected at New York's three major airports.
As of around 2:00 p.m. Eastern Time, Newark saw about 21% of its scheduled flights canceled and 20% delayed, while Philadelphia saw roughly 6% canceled and 36% delayed.
**Airspace Briefly Closed, Then Reopened in Phases**
FAA official Bryan Bedford stated that flights were briefly suspended for about 30 minutes to ensure airspace safety during a circuit replacement process. While inbound flights subsequently resumed first at JFK and LaGuardia, Philadelphia and Newark initially lacked a clear timeline for recovery.
By the afternoon and early evening, operations at LaGuardia and Philadelphia gradually recovered (though ground delays persisted at times), whereas inbound flight suspensions at Newark, JFK, and Teterboro had not yet been fully lifted, resulting in a significant backlog of flights waiting to take off.
This incident has once again raised concerns regarding the aging U.S. air traffic control system and the reliability of its redundancy measures. Media reports noted that the failure originated in "outdated communication circuits," while backup fiber-optic lines were damaged during construction work-exposing the vulnerability of critical communication links in terms of physical protection and emergency failover capabilities.