A telecommunications equipment failure at the Minneapolis Air Route Traffic Control Center disrupted air traffic across 10 Midwest states Thursday evening, grounding flights and triggering delays that rippled through Chicago O'Hare and other major hubs.
The outage struck the facility, located in Farmington, Minnesota, around 6 p.m. and knocked out radar and communications systems for a period, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. The Minneapolis center is the 14th-busiest air route traffic control facility in the country, overseeing roughly 330,000 square miles of airspace and handling more than 1.8 million aircraft in 2024. Airspace across Minnesota, Michigan, Kansas, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Iowa and Illinois was affected.
Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport was placed under a roughly two-hour ground stop, with about 87 flights delayed and average waits exceeding 90 minutes into the evening. Chicago O'Hare reported more than 1,100 delays, and some aircraft already airborne reportedly lost contact with controllers for a period during the outage.
"The FAA briefly paused flights into and out of Minneapolis Air Route Traffic Control Center's airspace due to telecommunication issues," the agency said, adding that services were fully restored and normal operations resumed by the evening. The cause remained under investigation.
The incident is the latest in a string of equipment failures that have hit FAA facilities over the past year, including repeated outages at Newark Liberty International Airport, feeding into wider scrutiny of aging air-traffic-control infrastructure and controller staffing levels as the agency pursues a broader modernization push.
The outage is likely to add fuel to congressional pressure on the FAA's modernization timeline; Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has repeatedly pressed for faster replacement of the agency's decades-old radar and communications equipment, and lawmakers are expected to seek a formal accounting of Thursday's failure alongside similar incidents reported elsewhere this year.
