FAA ground stop: How Tampa International Airport was impacted?

Tampa International Airport halted all departing flights Friday afternoon as the FAA issued a nationwide ground stop that has since been lifted.

admin November 14, 2026 3 minutes read

TAMPA, Fla. – Tampa International Airport halted all departing flights Friday afternoon as the FAA issued a nationwide ground stop that has since been lifted.

Tampa International flight disruptions

What we know:

While the nationwide ground stop was lifted more than four hours later, TPA officials said they are expecting flight operation impacts to continue. The airport remained open during the ground stop, but FOX 13 crews were seeing passengers unable to go on trams to the terminals.

By the numbers:

Just before the ground stop was lifted Friday evening, TPA was reporting 156 of its 536 flights were delayed and 96 of them have been canceled. Airport officials are asking travelers to contact their airlines for the latest information on their flights.

FAA nationwide ground stop

The backstory:

The FAA issued the nationwide ground stop Friday afternoon, citing a “temporary telecommunications outage.” At about 3:36 p.m. on Friday, communications among air traffic control experienced “instability,” Transportation Sec. Sean Duffy said during a Friday evening news conference.

“We didn’t lose all telecom. We didn’t lose all radar. But that instability, because of an abundance of caution and making sure we keep the American flier safe, we did the ground stop,” Duffy said.

“So we have TDM, telecom. So this is analog telecom. Our switches, are routers actually got overloaded with data and they went down and, I shouldn’t say they went down. They started to give us inconsistency in the data, from those, from those routers. And because of that, we shut the system down,” Duffy added. “It’s the old hardware, that went down.”

Federal officials on Friday said the nationwide ground stop is being viewed as a national emergency and while they have no indicators that it was the result of a cyberattack and just the result of an aging system, they aren’t ruling anything out.

“There is nothing that indicates it yet. Now, when we start looking at cyber threats, cyberattacks, typically some people is going to raise their hand up and say, hey, we did that. There’s no chatter, we haven’t seen any footprints, as you would say, or identifications of people that got into the system. It appears that this was mechanically driven. However, we’re still looking, so we’re not going to roll that out,” DHS Sec. Markwayne Mullin said.