Flight delays and cancellations at South Florida airports persist over weekend

Milena Malaver, Miami Herald on Nov 14, 2026

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MIAMI — Hundreds of flights were canceled at South Florida airports Saturday after a telecommunications outage prompted the Federal Aviation Administration to issue a nationwide ground stop Friday, blocking planes from taking off and causing headaches for weekend travelers.

The head of the FAA say delays and cancellations will continue through Sunday.

On Friday night, at the peak of the problems, about 800 flights at Miami International Airport and Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport were delayed and more than 275 canceled.

As of Saturday afternoon, 417 arriving and departing flights were delayed across the two airports — 277 at MIA and 140 at FLL. Another 167 flights were canceled at MIA and 162 at FLL, according to the tracker FlightAware.

The FAA lifted the ground stop shortly after 8 p.m. Friday, ending a disruption that lasted more than four hours.

But U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy warned that the lifting of the order would not get everything back to normal immediately.

“It will take us time to resume normal operations,” he said.

Nationwide, 50,000 flights were scheduled to fly Friday. By the time the ground stop was issued at around 3:45 p.m., about 30,000 flights had been completed, FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford told reporters at a news briefing Saturday morning.

Of the 20,000 remaining flights, more than half were canceled. He estimated that 4,000 to 5,000 of the 41,000 flights scheduled for Saturday will be canceled.

“Based on everything that we’re hearing from our airline partners, they believe that they’ll be able to have full schedule integrity by the close of business on Sunday,” Bedford said. “I do think the worst is behind us.”

The FAA said the ground stop was issued because of “a temporary telecommunications outage” and that flights were halted “out of an abundance of caution.”

“As the DOT Secretary Sean Duffy advised ... it will take time to resume normal operations following the lifting of the ground stop, so passengers should check with their airline for the latest flight information,” Arlene Satchell, an FLL spokesperson, said in an email to the Miami Herald on Saturday.

What went wrong?

The cause of the ground stop appears to be linked to a remote FAA facility where a contractor was replacing an old copper wire with fiber, officials said on Saturday.

“Virtually every single institution in America has gone from copper to fiber, from analog to digital,” Duffy said.

As the router was being switched, it began flooding other routers in the air traffic control system, he said.

“We had over 1,000 connection attempts every four to five seconds,” he said, adding that the surge began causing communication issues with aircraft and disrupting radar feeds.

He said officials are working to determine whether the incident was caused by user error or faulty equipment.

“This was an FAA system that didn’t meet the moment. Our contractor didn’t meet the moment, or the equipment didn’t meet the moment and caused the outages,” Duffy said.

“We saw the instability start to propagate into facilities we couldn’t identify. That’s when we made the decision to ground stop out of an abundance of caution, but no facilities went dark. Nothing was fully lost,” Bedford said.

Duffy said he has long been urging Congress to provide funding to modernize the nation’s air traffic control system, which he said relies on outdated equipment.

Congress approved a partial payment of $12.5 billion, but officials say additional funding is needed.

“We have to pay to use these old copper wires. We have to get off of them. They’re less reliable. So we have to make the transition,” Duffy said.

Duffy and Bedford dismissed speculation that the ground stop was caused by a cyberattack.

But they acknowledged that the possibility was initially considered and immediately investigated, prompting the activation of the White House Situation Room.

“We see zero evidence of anything nefarious,” Bedford said, “and zero evidence of anything AI-related.”