The five-hour ordeal ended Friday evening. Planes will be allowed to fly again, but the effects of the stoppage will be felt throughout the weekend.

The rare nationwide ground stop order, issued due to a communications problem affecting US air traffic control towers, caused chaos at airports and triggered the longest shutdown since the 9/11 attacks in 2001.

The over four-hour stoppage on Friday brought all air travel to a halt across the country and stranded tens of thousands of passengers.

The United States (US) FAA has lifted a five-hour nationwide flight ground stop after a telecom outage disrupted departures, affecting 1.5 million passengers.

The rare nationwide ground stop lasted about five hours Friday. An update to the network connecting the air traffic control system caused a reboot, crash and outage, sources told CBS News.

Longtime Slashdot readers cold fjord and sinij share news that the FAA grounded flights nationwide after a communications failure disrupted air traffic control centers across the country. By Friday evening, the outage had resulted in nearly 5,000 flight cancellations and roughly 10,000 delays, with ...