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US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said US aviation authorities had grounded flights at all airports across the country due to "communication issues affecting all regional air traffic control centers."
“The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating the incident. We will report on developments in the situation as soon as we receive information,” he said.
According to the Flightradar24 website, 3.1 thousand aircraft currently in the air are heading to American airports. The site reports that no new planes are currently flying.
According to CNN, which cites data from the website ATC.com, at least in some areas of the United States, air traffic control centers have completely lost the ability to communicate with aircraft.
CNN explains that without communication with traffic control centers, planes can continue to fly under visual flight rules, but in this case, most flights will not be able to take off or will be diverted.
US Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told reporters that the incident was not related to any attack on the US. “These are telecommunications outages. The location of all aircraft has been established."
He added that “everyone is safe” and assured that what was happening was not “a new September 11th.”
At the same time, Mullin recalled that the last time all flights to the United States were stopped was after the attack on September 11, 2001.
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The minister also noted that the incident with aviation traffic is not related to global outages on Microsoft servers, which, among other things, interfered with the work of the Outlook email client, the Teams video conferencing service and the Copilot AI chatbot.
The message is being updated.
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