'First thing I thought was doomsday': Panic and confusion at US airports as FAA ground stop leaves thousands stranded

In a rare move, the FAA ordered all departing flights to be grounded after a communications failure, triggering panic at airports.

The United States on Friday briefly grounded all departing flights across all airports following a communications outage, triggering chaos and confusion among hundreds of thousands of passengers whose travel plans were disrupted.

People line up to try and retrieve luggage during delays and cancellations at LaGuardia airport after the FAA ordered a ground stop for all departing flights. (AFP)

US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy later attributed the grounding to a legacy air traffic control communications system overload. He said the system began issuing faulty data to regional air traffic control centres, prompting a nationwide “ground stop” that led to more than 14,000 cancelled and delayed flights.

While the grounding has now been cancelled, authorities said restoration of flight services would be a gradual process.

The FAA ground stop triggered panic and confusion at airports across the United States as passengers were stranded with no end to delays in sight. "I may lose my mind," said Janice Llewellyn, 61, at New York's LaGuardia airport. Llewellyn was likely to miss her daughter's wedding in Toronto because of the shutdown.

"My husband flew all the way from England to get to the wedding. Oh gosh! I wish they had another flight, I wish I could get another flight, like, now," she told news agency AFP.

Several passengers said they and crew members were left completely in the dark as the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) barred all departing flights, and few had any clue what was going on. Several passengers were scrambling to find alternatives, with long lines forming at rental car counters at the airport in Las Vegas.

At the airport in Las Vegas, some fliers were told their journeys were delayed due to wind. One airline staffer said the ground stop would last eight hours and another said it would be 24 hours.

"The first thing I thought of was doomsday," a female passenger told the BBC, while another person said he was "shocked" by the announcement. A third passenger linked the shutdown with the Microsoft disruptions on Friday.

Riley Alexis Holmes, who had hoped to fly to Oregon in time for her brother's musical closing night, said her flight was cancelled after two hours of delay. "I called my mom and cried, and I'm just like sitting here waiting for information," she told Business Insider.

Kieran Cullen, 27, had been traveling for over 24 hours after his overseas deployment ended and was headed towards Jacksonville, Florida. He waited for hours before he was told that his flight was cancelled.

"So far, not a ton of information, other than just live speaker announcements discussing the centers having rotating blackouts on frequencies, but nothing specific. It's over 24 hours of travel, so it's definitely a bummer," he said.

"I feel very frustrated because you know, you come to the airport and then all of a sudden your whole plans have changed and you don't know when you're leaving, We're kind of stuck," Tiara Johnson told AFP.

One passenger told NBC News that she had never seen such a situation "in all my years of flying", describing the situation as unsettling.

"I have no idea what's going on. I am pretty sure we're not flying anywhere tonight. We're ready to go back to the room. It's absolutely ridiculous," said another passenger.

What did officials say?

The ground stop was only the second time such an alert was given in US airspace since the 9/11 attacks. The FAA lifted the ground stop after around four hours, with President Donald Trump’s administration saying there was no evidence the outage was the result of foul play.

"This is a legacy system problem. We have old, old switches, old routers. We use 1980s little copper lines. It’s an old system that went down, and went down everywhere. It got overloaded," said Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin stressed there was no evidence of any hostile action on Friday. "We’ve seen zero evidence that this was a cyber attack or (AI) attack," he said, while ruling out any connection with the outage that affected Microsoft this week.