Departing flights seem to be unaffected. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has attributed the outage to an equipment malfunction, which led to the loss of radio frequencies for air traffic controllers. The alert is in place for flights arriving between August 28 at 12:22pm ET and August 29 at 11:59pm.

Travelers have expressed their dissatisfaction on social media, noting instances where flights were delayed several times within a short span of 15 minutes. This disruption coincides with the start of the busy Labor Day travel weekend, during which Newark airport is anticipating more than three million passengers.

“Traveling this weekend? It’s going to be busy,” the Newark Airport tweeted, advising passengers to allocate extra time for arriving, parking, checking in, and passing through security. However, they have not addressed the current outage publicly. This marks the second outage affecting controllers at the Philadelphia ATC center within 24 hours, with the center overseeing Newark’s airspace.

The first outage took place on Wednesday between 6:30pm and 7:30pm, causing temporary communication issues between planes and controllers. Newark air controllers have been cautioned about the potential for frequency issues over the next 24 hours, according to a controller who spoke with ABC News.

To handle the situation, the FAA began restricting flights into Newark to 28 per hour, a decrease from the usual 34, lasting at least through Friday. Additionally, arriving flights are being spaced approximately 20 miles apart as they approach the airport.

The FAA last year relocated control of the Newark airspace area to Philadelphia to address staffing and congested New York City area traffic. The airport has experienced several outages this year, with two in May.

On May 19, a brief two-second outage occurred at the Philadelphia TRACON radar approach control facility around 11:35am. The FAA reported no flight disruptions, but the incident was under investigation as part of ongoing equipment reliability concerns.

This was the fourth reported outage in a month, the others hit May 11, May 9 and April 28, which saw over 1,000 flights canceled and significant delays after radar and communications went dark for around 90 seconds. Following air traffic control issues this spring, the FAA cut the number of flights arriving and departing from the airport throughout the summer.