FAA Says Newark Airport Hit by New 90-Second Communications Outage

Radar screens at the major U.S. airport went dark earlier on Friday, the agency says.

United Airlines planes land and prepare to take off at Newark Liberty International Airport in Newark, N.J., on Jan. 27, 2025. Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters

Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey lost communication for about 90 seconds on Friday, said the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), coming in the midst of concerns about air traffic control at the major U.S. hub.

“There was a telecommunications outage that impacted communications and radar display at Philadelphia TRACON Area C, which guides aircraft in and out of Newark Liberty International Airport airspace,” the FAA said on Friday. TRACON Area C refers to a specific section within the Philadelphia Terminal Radar Approach Control, a type of air traffic control facility.

The 90-second outage took place earlier in the day at around 3:55 a.m. local time, the federal agency said.

A separate bulletin issued by the FAA also said that due to weather and low cloud bases, there is a traffic management program in effect for air traffic arriving at the Newark airport, which has caused some arriving flights to be delayed.

Air traffic monitoring website FlightAware said at the time of publication that Newark airport, or EWR, is seeing departure delays of more than an hour and arrival delays of 45 minutes to an hour, while inbound flights are being delayed at their origin by 4 hours and 22 minutes.

A tracker run by FlightAware also showed that nearly 300 flights at Newark have been delayed, representing about 28 percent of all flights. Another 131 flights, or 12 percent, had been canceled.

It’s the second time in about a week that air traffic controllers lost contact with planes over Newark since last week, triggering widespread flight delays and cancellations. U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy confirmed this week that the airport lost contact with planes for about 30 seconds, adding that the issue “has to be fixed.”

“The primary communication line went down, the backup line didn’t fire, and so for 30 seconds we lost contact with air traffic,” Duffy said during an interview on Fox News on Monday. “Now, were planes going to crash? No. They have communication devices ... but it’s a sign that we have a frail system in place, and it has to be fixed.”

The National Air Traffic Controllers Association said on Monday that air traffic controllers in Philadelphia responsible for coordinating planes in Newark, which serves the New York City area, temporarily lost radar contact and communications with the aircraft under their control on April 28.

And Scott Kirby, chief executive of United Airlines, the carrier that operates the most flights from Newark, last week said 20 percent of the FAA controllers for Newark had walked off the job. However, the controllers’ union said the workers did not walk off the job but took absences under the Federal Employees Compensation Act, which provides for absences for injuries or on-the-job trauma.

Kirby said later on Monday that United was canceling 35 more flights per day at its Newark hub “to reduce the traffic, get all the airlines to participate, and then we can move forward and rebuild back to capacity.”

Newark airport has also been undergoing runway construction this spring, which has cut capacity, and the FAA has faced a persistent nationwide shortage of air traffic controllers.

The FAA said on Wednesday it is taking immediate steps to address the ongoing air traffic control problems at the Newark airport, which is considered one of the busiest U.S. hubs and is one of three major airports responsible for receiving numerous flights to people living in and around the New York City area.

Reuters contributed to this report.