ATLANTA, Ga. — Travelers at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport spent Saturday sleeping on terminal floors, hunting for hotel rooms and waiting on rebooked flights as airlines worked through the backlog left by Friday’s nationwide ground stop.
By just after noon Saturday, the Atlanta airport had logged more than 450 canceled flights and more than 300 delays. The cancellation count for the day later topped 600. Crews also ran into federal rest rules, and at least one Saturday morning departure was scrubbed when its pilot reported fatigue after a long stretch stuck on the tarmac the day before.
Security lines at the domestic terminal stayed fairly short through the morning, generally taking somewhere between 10 and roughly 20-plus minutes. Airport officials expected normal operations to return by Sunday night and urged travelers to check flight status before heading to the airport.
The disruption began at 3:36 p.m. Friday, when federal aviation officials halted departing flights across the country. The order was lifted at 8:15 p.m. U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Saturday that air traffic control systems were fully back online and that the stop was a precaution, issued with upward of 3,500 planes already aloft.
Federal officials said the outage struck while L3Harris, an FAA contractor, was doing routine work at an outlying agency site, with crews swapping copper telecommunications lines for fiber. A router then flooded the network with connection attempts. Investigators do not suspect a cyberattack. Duffy repeated his call for $50 billion from Congress to modernize aging FAA telecommunications.
Delta Air Lines, headquartered in Atlanta, is letting customers rebook flexibly at no added cost and is encouraging customers whose plans can shift to fly Monday or later.
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