FAA halts all US departures as Stephen King jokes about aliens
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) stopped departures at every US airport on Friday, and novelist Stephen King used the chaos to post a joke on X. The agency ordered the nationwide ground stop on the afternoon of Friday, November 13, 2026, and it kept the order in place for more than four hours.
King’s post appeared while the country’s air travel remained frozen. The FAA cited “extraordinary circumstances” and reasons of safety when it issued the order. Flights already in the air were allowed to land, but no aircraft could take off.
Stephen King’s post imagines aliens behind the halt
In a post on his X account, King wrote that “the aliens have landed” and that they were the real reason for the stop. He added that the visitors did not want to start a worldwide panic, and he described them as blind but able to hear extremely well.
The post drew more than 2,000 comments within a few hours, many of them memes and sarcastic replies. Some users asked, with irony, why aliens would act as if the United States were the only country on Earth. Others turned the post into political jokes about the slogans of former president Donald Trump, and some recalled the global Microsoft outage to feed the conspiracy theory.
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Crowded terminals and the figures behind the halt
The order caused heavy crowds at large airports, including Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. Officials cited a telecommunications problem as the cause, and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said there was no indication of a hostile act against the country. The main numbers from the shutdown are below.
- Start of the stop: 3:54 pm Eastern time on Friday, November 13, 2026.
- Reopening: 8:15 pm Eastern time, when the FAA lifted the order.
- Flights canceled: 4,000, according to FlightAware.
- Flights delayed: more than 10,000 departures across the country.
- Cause: a communications outage that affected all 22 air route traffic control centers.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy confirmed that the airspace had reopened that night. He warned, however, that the effects on schedules would last. “Opening the airspace does not mean all flights will take off right away. The process will be slow,” Duffy said during a press conference.
What passengers should do before going to the airport
Airlines had to put aircraft and crews back in position, and rebooking could take more than 24 hours to process. Travelers with flights or connections this weekend were advised to take the following steps.
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- Check the status of the flight in the airline’s app or website before going to the terminal.
- Expect rebooking to take more than 24 hours, because aircraft and crews are out of position.
- Use the phone and virtual customer service channels to avoid long lines at the airport.
Only two earlier nationwide halts in modern US history
Before this episode, the sky had been cleared across the US only two times in modern history. The first came on September 11, 2001, after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The second happened in January 2023, when a failure in a safety notification system for pilots kept aircraft on the ground.
The new halt renewed pressure on the aging technology behind the air travel system. Congress had already approved an initial US$12.5 billion package for structural aviation reforms. After the emergency, the FAA and the White House asked for another US$30.1 billion to modernize the country’s communication systems.
