FAA ground stop fallout: Hundreds of flights canceled, delayed

Lower numbers all across the board, but disruptions continue. Here's a look at FlightAware's live flight tracker. More than 8,000 flights have been canceled today, with nearly 21,000 delays. This comes after we saw more than 7,000 cancellations on Friday, with more than 25,000 flights delayed. KTVU's Betty Yu is live at San Francisco International Airport. Betty, what are you hearing from travelers, and are things starting to get back to normal? Amber, there's still a lot of frustration here at SFO where we're continuing to see these ripple effects, even though flights were clear to resume yesterday. For many of these passengers, what should have been just a routine trip has now turned into a days-long ordeal. Another day and night of frustration at SFO as frustrated travelers scramble to get where they need to go. For San Francisco resident PJ, a direct flight to Detroit has turned into a journey lasting well over 30 hours involving two different airlines. But his reason for traveling makes the delays especially painful. Unfortunately, my mom passed away and I'm headed to Detroit for her funeral, which is tomorrow. I found out yesterday Immediately booked a flight and got to SFO around noon and I over the last day I've been canceled from four flights. Luckily, luckily I think I'm about to get on one that makes it. For Austin, who's visiting from Phoenix, the delays kept piling up. They just kept pushing back and more and more until literally got canceled. So you just found out right now your flight home got canceled? Yeah, pretty much. So I'm just stuck here now for an entire night. At least the airlines were pretty nice and rebooked me for tomorrow. But there's some people that I've talked to that won't be out until Monday. Today. The chaos stems from Friday's hours-long FAA ground stop. It was only the third nationwide shutdown of its kind and the longest in 25 years. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy explained what went wrong. Either through contractor error or a faulty piece of equipment, that router that was being replaced as we switched from copper to fiber, it started flooding other routers in our air traffic control system. So specifically, we had Over 1,000 connection attempts every four to five seconds. And what that did was gave us issues with our communication with... The FAA administrator apologized to travelers and said there's no indication the disruption was intentional. I want to reiterate, we see zero evidence of anything nefarious and zero evidence of anything AI related. So we want to be clear that We have an equipment issue. This Cowboys fan has been stuck at SFO since Saturday morning, trying to get to Sunday's game against the Niners in Texas. They have one flight tomorrow morning at 5.30, but it's a wrap. I will sit on my couch and watch the game. You know, it's not even so much about the game. A lot of my friends are 49er fans, and my buddies, you know, Cowboy fans, so it was more of a brotherhood. And the FAA says that it does expect all air travel to largely return to normal by the end of tomorrow. Amber. Betty, I heard that you had personal experience with these travel disruptions. Can you tell me a little bit about that? Yes, I was here just yesterday experiencing all this. We had planned to take off around 12.30, and then we heard the announcement that there was this nationwide ground stop. We ended up getting delayed and delayed an hour at a time before eventually our flight was canceled to Las Vegas. So it was really disappointing because we missed a concert. The tickets were nonrefundable, and we never made it to Vegas to celebrate a big birthday. Really, really frustrating. So I really empathize with a lot of the passengers and the huge disruptions that this created yesterday. I know yesterday I was out there and person after person all had stories about places they were scheduled to be at weddings, celebration of life, baby showers. So thanks, Betty.