An hours-long ground stop at airports nationwide scrambled flights Friday night.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced the ground stop at all airports in the lower 48 states. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said that the outage was due to an overload of old systems.
Thousands of flights were canceled and delayed.
The ground stop has since lifted, and airports are working to get their schedules back on track, though there isn’t a clear timeline of when that will happen.
Both the Seattle Seahawks and the University of Washington Huskies are playing on the road this weekend. NCAA athletes usually fly out the day before a Saturday game.
According to the Associated Press (AP), when the ground stop was reported, the Huskies returned to campus and were awaiting directives from the FAA and the Big Ten for its game at Michigan State.
After the ground stop was lifted, UW athletics wrote on X.com that the UW football team “anticipates resuming travel to Michigan State this evening. No determination has been made regarding the kickoff time for Saturday’s game. We remain in communication with the Big Ten Conference and will provide updates as additional information becomes available.”
As of 6:20 p.m., the Huskies were en route to Michigan.
Duffy said NCAA teams would be prioritized in trying to reschedule their flights for weekend games, according to the AP.
“I would encourage those football teams to reach out to the FAA, to schedule their flight times and make sure they can move” to make their kickoff, Duffy said.
The UW men’s basketball team, however, had their game against Utah rescheduled. According to the Seattle Times, instead of a Saturday tip-off, the Huskies will play on Sunday,
It doesn’t appear at this time that the Seahawks were impacted by the ground stop, since they play on Sunday.
During a press conference on Friday, head coach Mike Macdonald said he was recently made aware of the ground stop (when it was active) and that they will “play it by ear” and “adjust what we need to adjust.”