by Lacey Pfalz
Last updated: 11:40 AM ET, Fri August 7, 2026
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is investigating an air traffic control outage that occurred at a Minneapolis facility on August 6, leading to hundreds of flight diversions, delays and groundings before the issue was resolved.
According to ABC News, ten Midwest states were impacted, including Minnesota, Michigan, Kansas, Missouri, the Dakotas, Nebraska and Wisconsin, with some delays ranging around 90 minutes across the airports after the outage was fixed.
The air traffic control facility where the outage took place handles air traffic across 330,000 square miles across the Midwest.
FlightAware’s airport traffic data reported dozens to hundreds of delays across the region, with Chicago O’Hare, one of the region’s busiest international hubs, reporting over 1,100 delays yesterday. Minneapolis-St. Paul and Detroit, other major Midwest hubs, reported over 200 delays each.
The number of cancellations was much smaller throughout, in the single and double digits.
The airports seem to have resolved the delays as of yesterday, August 6, as FlightAware is not reporting any major delays or cancellations across the Midwest at the time of publication.
There is not currently an identified cause for the air traffic control outage, although the system has experienced other outages in other parts of the nation in recent years due to the system’s age. There have also been hacks at Midwest water infrastructure facilities in recent weeks that were suspected to have been conducted by Iran.
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