8 planes left SFO after the FAA grounded everything

Eight planes took off from San Francisco after the FAA ordered every airport in America to stop all departures. The nationwide ground stop — only the third in US history — started at 12:54 p.m. PT, and by 4:30 p.m. my own check of the departure board showed flights still leaving, just very late.

What happened

At 3:54 p.m. ET on Friday, November 13, the FAA Command Center issued the order: "Due to extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety... all airports are ground stopped. All departing traffic should remain ground stopped until further notice." Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy confirmed it at 4:16 p.m. ET: a communication issue affecting all Air Route Traffic Control Centers. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told reporters a "telecommunication outage throughout FAA" was the cause, adding there is "no prior indication as of yet that this was nefarious attack against us" and "this isn't a safety threat to the American people or another 9/11."

The advisory lists an effective period through 11:30 p.m. ET, but the order says "until further notice" — the expiry time is not a promise. By early evening, Reuters counted more than 1,000 cancellations and nearly 10,000 delays nationwide. Eurocontrol suspended US-bound departures from its 42 member countries between 5 p.m. and midnight ET at the FAA's request. The National Weather Service reported nationwide internet and communications issues the same day.

This has happened exactly twice before: September 11, 2001, and January 11, 2023, when a NOTAM system outage grounded everything. The pattern is worth naming: American aviation keeps getting grounded by back-office IT, not by weather or by airplanes.

What I measured at SFO

I pulled live FlightAware data for SFO at 4:28–4:30 p.m. PT, about three and a half hours into the stop. The airport's own delay board read: departure delays averaging 1 hour 35 minutes, arrival delays averaging 1 hour 9 minutes, and inbound flights delayed at their origin an average of 2 hours 18 minutes — that last one attributed to wind, a separate SFO problem stacked on top of the ground stop.

Then the departures. The 15 most recent SFO departures had all taken off, with a median departure delay of 71 minutes and a worst case of 226 minutes. Eight of them left after the ground stop began at 12:54 p.m. PT:

Flight     Destination   Wheels up (PT)   Delay
EVA7       Taipei (TPE)  2:32 PM          3 min
UAL871     Taipei (TPE)  3:00 PM          64 min
JAL1       Tokyo (HND)   3:07 PM          115 min
UAL809     Manila (MNL)  3:43 PM          72 min
JAL57      Tokyo (NRT)   3:50 PM          226 min
UAL857     Shanghai (PVG) 3:56 PM         154 min
UAL300     Honolulu (HNL) 3:59 PM         101 min
APZ112     Seoul (ICN)   4:04 PM          15 min

Seven of the eight were international; the one domestic departure was Honolulu. Zero cancellations in this 15-flight window — but that window is small and recent, so don't read it as a national number. The Reuters counts are the national picture; mine is one airport's board.

The ground stop is a valve, not a freeze

The advisory says all departing traffic stays grounded, and the data says planes kept leaving. Both are true, and the gap is the story. The FAA's own order says inbound international flights are handled "on a case-by-case basis," and CBS reported that some international flights on both coasts were approved for departure in the late afternoon. What I saw at SFO matches that exactly: the flights that got out were the long-haul international ones, released one at a time, hours late.

That is how a ground stop actually works in practice. It is not a switch that cuts departures to zero. It is a throttle the FAA tightens until the system it can still control — the controllers it can still talk to — matches the traffic it is willing to take. A telecom outage that hits every ARTCC doesn't stop the airplanes. It stops the coordination, and the FAA responds by shrinking the coordination problem until it fits in whatever channels still work.

One subplot, already denied: ASI, the company behind an AI air-traffic tool called SMART, had to put out a statement saying the ground stop "is not based on or a result of the SMART system." When the infrastructure fails this visibly, everyone with a product near the blast radius has to prove it wasn't them.

What I am watching

Two things. First, whether flights resume cleanly at 11:30 p.m. ET or the recovery flaps — restored systems dying under returning load is exactly what Microsoft's outage did this week, and aviation's restart has the same thundering-herd shape. Second, what "telecommunication outage throughout FAA" actually means in the post-incident report: which system, which vendor, which single point of failure. The FAA has promised an update at 11 p.m. ET. The last two nationwide stops each produced a report that named a specific system. This one should too, because "extraordinary circumstances" is a symptom, not a cause — and a country that grounds every flight over a telecom outage has a telecom problem, not an aviation problem.

Sources: FAA advisory as reported by USA Today and NorthJersey.com (November 13, 2026); Reuters disruption counts via USA Today/NorthJersey reporting; Eurocontrol advisory via Palm Beach Post live coverage; FlightAware airport-delays and airport-flights data for KSFO, pulled by me November 13, 2026, 4:28–4:30 p.m. PT. The 15-flight window is the most recent departures listed at pull time; national delay and cancellation totals are Reuters', not mine.