US DHS chief Markwayne Mullin said there is no threat to the US after the FAA grounded all departing flights on Friday. Nearly 7,000 flights got delayed or cancelled. Mullin noted, "There's no indication as of yet that this was a nefarious attack." A telecommunications outage caused the massive disruption.

US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) chief Markwayne Mullin has said there is no indication of a threat to the country following a nationwide ground stop that halted all departing flights across the United States on Friday, disrupting nearly 7,000 flights, Al Jazeera reported on Friday. Speaking at a news conference, Mullin said preliminary investigations pointed to a telecommunications outage affecting the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) air traffic control network rather than a deliberate attack. "There's no indication as of yet that this was a nefarious attack against it. It's just a telecommunications outage as of right now," he told reporters.

The disruption prompted the FAA to issue a nationwide ground stop for departing flights after a communication failure affected all Air Route Traffic Control Centers. US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy confirmed the issue in a post on X, saying it involved "a communication issue impacting all Air Route Traffic Control Centers". He added that FAA technicians were investigating the problem. Aviation tracker FlightAware reported that nearly 7,000 flights were delayed or cancelled amid the disruption. The incident marks only the third time all departing flights across the US have been grounded nationwide.

The first such shutdown took place on September 11, 2001, following the terrorist attacks, while the second occurred in January 2023 after a malfunction in the FAA's pilot notification system forced a temporary suspension of domestic departures for less than two hours. According to FAA data, the agency has more than 14,000 air traffic controllers responsible for managing over 44,000 flights departing from airports across the country each day. The disruption comes as the FAA works to modernise its air traffic management infrastructure. Last week, the agency announced that the first digital air traffic control towers in the US had officially become operational in Alaska and Florida.

The modernisation programme is aimed at reducing flight delays and improving air traffic movement.