At 1:06 p.m. on Sunday, Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport went dark, after an electrical fire damaged two Georgia Power substations serving the airport, including its "redundant system" in case of power failure. Thousands of passengers at the world's busiest airport were trapped for hours on grounded airplanes, trams between terminals, or in the dark airport, and the FAA quickly declared a ground stop, causing the cancelation of about 1,000 flights in and out of Atlanta on Sunday, with hundreds of flights scrapped for Monday, a week before Christmas.
Power crews restored electricity at Concourse F at 7:30 p.m., six and a half hours after the blackout began, and several other areas got power shortly before midnight. Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed said officials don't yet know what caused the fires, adding, "We certainly understand that the outage has caused frustration and anger and we are doing everything that we can to get folks back home right away."
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