US resumes flights after a four-and-a-half-hour shutdown caused by obsolete equipment

The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on Friday night lifted the nationwide ground stop it had ordered in the afternoon, after some four and a half hours of airspace closure that left thousands of flights cancelled. Donald Trump’s administration blamed the failure on overloaded, outdated analogue telecommunications equipment at air traffic control centres, ruled out a cyberattack for now and warned that the return to normal would be slow.