FAA briefly lifts ground stop at San Francisco International Airport

Flights bound for San Francisco International Airport were briefly held at departure points Sunday night, when the Federal Aviation Administration imposed a ground stop that lasted from 9:53 p.m. to 11:15 p.m. PDT. The restriction reached beyond a single terminal or carrier, affecting flights tied to some Western U.S. air traffic control centers and underscoring how quickly a localized pause can spread through the national network.

The FAA lifted the stop slightly before its scheduled end time, easing the immediate pressure on arrivals into San Francisco, California. Even so, a short disruption at SFO can create a long tail of delays because aircraft, crews and gates are tightly sequenced across the country. When a hub such as SFO slows, missed connections, longer taxi times and schedule resets can follow well into the next wave of departures.

SFO is large enough for that ripple to matter. The airport said 54.1 million passengers traveled through it in fiscal year 2025, with nonstop service to 58 international destination airports and 86 domestic destination airports. City officials later said traffic topped 54.5 million passengers in 2025, a scale that reflects both the airport’s role on the West Coast and its position as a gateway to Asia. United Airlines, which uses SFO as a hub and trans-Pacific gateway, is among the carriers most exposed when operations tighten there.

The weekend stop came against a backdrop of added operational pressure. In March, the FAA imposed new safety restrictions at SFO tied to runway repaving and a decision to prohibit side-by-side approaches to the airport’s parallel east-west runways in clear weather. Reuters reported at the time that the move would limit some landings and could create significant delays. That made Sunday’s interruption less an isolated glitch than another reminder of how fragile the system can be when weather, equipment, staffing or security issues briefly freeze traffic at a major airport.

San Francisco’s traffic rebound has also been marked by new international service. City officials said recent additions included San José, Costa Rica; Adelaide, Australia; and Terceira in the Azores. Those long-haul routes add to SFO’s importance, but they also raise the stakes whenever the FAA slows the flow in or out of the airport, because even an 82-minute halt can echo across an entire day’s schedule.