The Federal Aviation Administration said Friday afternoon that its nationwide ground stop remains in effect and that flights will be released gradually as air traffic control centers recover from a communications failure.

"The FAA Command Center ground stop remains in effect. As enroute facilities recover, flights will be allowed to depart through coordination with the Air Traffic Control System Command Center," the agency said in an advisory that took effect at 3:45 p.m. Mountain time. The advisory gave the reason as a "communications failure" and said the next update is expected at 9 p.m.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told reporters outside the White House that there was "no indication, as of yet, that this was a nefarious act against us," CBS News reported. "It was just a telecommunication outage, as of right now," Mullin said.

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The ground stop took effect at 1:53 p.m., as the Kiowa County Press reported earlier Friday. The FAA has blamed a "temporary telecommunications outage" and said in a post on X that "every flight has been accounted for." Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the problem affected all of the Air Route Traffic Control Centers, which manage high-altitude traffic between airports. Colorado is handled by the Denver center in Longmont.

Departures will not resume everywhere at once. Under the FAA's advisory, flights can leave only as the centers serving their region recover, and only with approval from the Command Center.

At Denver International Airport, 43 departures had been canceled and 308 delayed Friday as of 3:49 p.m., according to the flight-tracking service FlightAware. Another 49 arrivals had been canceled and 351 delayed. Nationally, FlightAware counted 1,555 cancellations of flights within, into or out of the United States, up from 768 less than half an hour earlier, and 10,343 delays. The totals include some delays from wind and low clouds earlier in the day.

Travelers should check with their airline before leaving for the airport. The FAA posts current airport conditions at nasstatus.faa.gov.

Nationwide ground stops are rare. The last one came in January 2023, when the failure of the FAA's Notice to Air Missions system held departures across the country for about 90 minutes. Before that, the FAA cleared the skies after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

This is a developing story and will be updated.