US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy says a nationwide ground stop has been lifted after an outage halted all flights
Duffy says the travel chaos is going to take time to unwind, with many passengers still stranded at airports. BBC reported.
White House officials said earlier the ground stop was due to an air traffic control communications issue - here's what we know so far
There's zero evidence this was a cyber-attack against the US, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin says - what else did he say?
The incident was the largest groundstop in the US since the one after 11 September 2001
US bound flights from across Europe were suspended after a Federal Aviation Administration request.
Duffy explains that there have been previous issues with networks and outages including when global leaders were flying into New York for the UN earlier this year, as well as issues at New Jersey's Newark airport.
The transport secretary has been asked whether this outage will affect holiday travel.
Duffy says that it is going to “take us some time to get back to capacity”, but thinks things will be “back up and operational as we come in to the heat of travel during Thanksgiving”.
The Thanksgiving travel period, which begins in less than two weeks, is usually one of the busiest times of the year for air travel in the US.
Duffy has added that larger plane travel is being prioritised over "smaller movements" to try and get things back up and running as quickly as possible.
Mullin says a "complete overhaul" of the transportation system is needed and Duffy emphasises that point, saying this won't happen overnight but it's desperately needed.
The transport secretary cautions incidents like this one will continue to happen in the future if the transportation system isn't overhauled.
If there are any issues, Duffy says they will shut down the system. He says there wasn't a complete blackout in communications during this incident, but it was intermittent, so they decided to enact the ground stop.
Duffy explains that even though they had some communications, when you have issues and you can't immediately communicate or see planes, "that's a risk that we're unwilling to tolerate".
