FAA issues national ground stop – lifted 4.5 hours later
nbcnews.com
nbcnews.com
Of particular note is this section: Risks of FTI Outages for Existing Operational Services As of December 2009, Harris reported that there are a total of 20,982 services operating on the FTI network. While FAA has transitioned all 1,808 IP services supporting FAA flight plans to the new FTI fiber optic network, additional risks will be introduced when the Agency begins transitioning other FAA services, such as En Route Automation Modernization (ERAM) and NextGen platforms, which also require IP technology to operate. Moreover, there are 19,174 existing services that may be transitioned to the new FTI fiber optic network. According to FAA, transitioning these remaining services is important because FTI now connects older FAA systems that provide safety-critical voice and surveillance radar information by utilizing Time Division Multiplex (TDM) technology, instead of IP services.
Glad someone else appreciates circuit switched technologies though :) . It really does shine in any application that isn't burst-y data transfers.
Now, on many calls, the first few seconds are spent on "Do you hear me? Hello? Yes I hear you.". (At work, we call it the Microsoft Teams Random Number Generator - every call gives you one bit with around 50/50 chance (aka one bit)).
by far the clearest phone calls i've ever been on which were not landline were 2001 era Sprint CDMA, probably because the vocoder bitrate was higher than in later configurations (like LTE), or the MOS scores were held to a higher standard then.
Phones of old could be high quality, and they were always extremely low latency. But usually they were scratchy or muffled or noisy or otherwise compressed. A Teams call on a low-latency low-loss line with good microphones on each side is a far better experience than any long distance call from the 90's. It's just that normally the data connection is not so good.
There's an unverified mention of a fiber cut, which might result in fewer circuits being available. That usually returns an "all circuits busy" signal.
None of the explanations will make sense until they stop coming from unqualified political appointees.
A TDM system can't have infinite throughput, can it? Either you operate with fixed slot windows, as legacy systems usually do, in which case excess data has to wait and buffers fill up, or else you operate with variable time slots, and at some point the windows get too narrow to transmit usable information.
It doesn't make sense to me to claim you "cannot overload" a TDM system. Bandwidth is finite.
Ah, the glorious 3kHz frequency range of old.
Your feelings here have no technical basis. TDM is pre-provisioned, bandwith-reserved, latency-capped network that was probably hard for packet switched network 25 years ago. But with all that has gone in -- switched ethernet, qos, oam -- there is absolutely no reason to go back. Heck, even whatsapp calls across 12-hour time zones are quite crisp and it is free.
Good to remember that a WhatsApp call is being routed over a much more diverse, heterogeneous set of networks than a Western Electric 500 phone was. 32-bit stereo raw audio is roughly 2.82 Mbps, which is a lot better than what an older phone did. On any link between two endpoints with 20 Mbps or more symmetric, you can do this trivially. WhatsApp can give you good performance between two crowded venues on completely different parts of the world. Just a very different experience.
What kills realtime is buffer bloat
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/faa-temporarily-halts-flights-ac...
> The outage appears to be affecting a telecommunications network overseen by L3Harris Technologies, according to people briefed on the matter. The network handles crucial radio frequencies that air-traffic controllers use to communicate with pilots, the people said. It wasn’t immediately clear whether the outage also affected the radar feeds that controllers use to keep aircraft safely separated in the skies.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/faa-issues-nationwide-ground-st...
> An update to the private communications network that connects America's air traffic control system caused the system to reboot, leading to a crash and a communications outage, multiple sources told CBS News. The system is operated by L3Harris, which did not immediately respond to CBS News' request for comment.
And that's why you never deploy to prod on a Friday.
"it's computer science, if you make a mistake nobody will die!
Unless you're dealing with nuclear plants, medicals, or airlines"
I spend at least 1/3 of my fridays answering all requests with "Read Only Friday."
I worked for a person who had a fixation on "neat" deadines: the "first of the month", "the end of the week", "the start of the quarter", etc. It'd be one thing if the dates were tied to legal compliance (tax filings, etc), but that usually wasn't the case. They were chosen because they were "tidy".
I'd time meetings looking to maximize time for work. You try to meet late in the day Wednesday because an early Tuesday meeting might get an "end of the week" deadline. A late Wednesday meeting was more likely to garner a "end of next week" deadline. Meeting Thursday or Friday guaranteed an "end of next week" but you lost Thursday and Friday work time. Wednesday was a gamble, though, because it was still early enough to get you an "end of the week". Meeting after lunch helped with that.
You always had to be aware of the numeric calendar day, though. Gunning for an "end of next week" deadline when next Wednesday was the end of the month (or worse, end of the quarter) almost guaranteed you an earlier deadline than you wanted.
All of this deadline-setting happened with little regard for the amount of time work was going to take.
It was immensely fun, when setting a deadline in this person's absence, to get a group to agree on a mid-week deadline. You could see it make this person's skin crawl hearing that the work would be done on Tuesday or a Thursday.
Overnight periods are when the air travel system largely resets itself from each day's cascading delays, mechanical failures and bad weather.
so you were forced to release updates on weekends? isn't that worse?
Most likely, they HAD to do it.
If something goes down on Saturday there’s a good chance I’m out of cell service
Hey software engineers - you know that working weekends is unusual, right? Like... please tell me someone has at least negotiated your right to only work 5 days a week so if you're working a weekend you get Monday and Tuesday off.
If not... Has anyone told y'all you should unionize?
The other option is to fail during the workweek. If the software is directly generating money for the users and the developers are judged on what actual business value they provide then failure during business hours is worse.
For industries that serve customer bases that are down-cycled on weekends, the dominant effect is "Deploy on Friday to minimize customer disruption chance."
For industries that operate with a 24/7 uptime expectation, the dominant effect is "do not deploy on Friday so you don't have to pay for your expensive software engineers pulling extra hours on a weekend. Much better to have disruption while the folks most qualified to fix it are in-house and alert."
Else, do it during regular business hours and very far from time off (whether that's CoB, weekend, PTO, etc. -- "not on Friday"). If something goes so terribly sideways that users are impacted, at least you have nearly everyone available so hopefully it won't take long to stabilize.
But the entire first months of the Iran War was started on Friday after the markets closed. It took a few weeks for most Americans to catch on.
My money is on some mundane ops issue like "it takes lots of time to get sign off for the upgrade from lots of different stakeholders and the necessary upgrade was falling days or weeks behind, leading to a key IT person to decide to YOLO the upgrade/deployment".
I've heard that Sec Transport Duffy has been pushing FAA upgrades faster than is safe, so maybe the employee rushed it so this upgrade wouldn't hold back some other larger timeline. There have been several articles recently about how the FAA is full of people who are "too risk averse", suggesting that there might be an effort to push riskier projects faster. Having a nationwide outage is one of the likely symptoms of raising risk tolerance.
In what sense? It was well reported at the time, so presumably most people know about it. I'd be interested in what makes you think the time and day of week chosen would delay market or public reaction be _weeks_.
As an insider to the technology industry, I would surmise the technical reason for it is that they didn't want to work over the weekend.
(Yes, this comment is tongue in cheek, but not everyone follows the "don't deploy on Friday" rule, even people in mission critical fields.)
Isn't that exactly what they did? If you do major change on Friday at 3pm you likely will work over weekend.
It’s just dumb.
But what I’m hearing is that one company “L3Harris” could take down the airfristructure anytime it wanted to. That’s not great.
Well, it worked so far, I think it is great. 100% availability is a dream.
That’s why for example, you have ATC Zero protocols when communications go out all of a sudden at airports. And I imagine there is something similar for airborne planes that are not near any of their destinations.
By people with unreliable systems and a lot of myhts behind.
In a well engineered organization, you can deploy whenever you want. Sure, it will not work 100% of the time, but you figure out why, fix the problem and you will be one step closer to the mythical 100%. And so on. Deploying less frequently is what creates more problems.
My (hopeful) assumption is that air traffic control isn't based on the "weekends are the off hours" mindset.
I really hope we get an official or leaked root cause analysis and postmortem of this and it doesn't get buried because all the money in my pockets is willing to bet there was some deep incompetence responsible at the executive level.
If it was a malicious act, or maybe even two, would they publicly state it was the case ?
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/17/l3harris-ceo-chris-kubasik-l...
You mean he facilitated sale of restricted AI chips to China?
Sorry, but I am tired of the effort to make it look like Jansen's crime was infidelity.
If he just went to whore house he would be fine (well, ignoring a possible expensive divorce).
So from that alone I don't trust the integrity of this source's reporting.
You'll find Intel, AMD, and every other name brand of CPU/GPU in all countries on earth, that doesn't make those companies culpable.
No, they mean "had a sexual relationship with a subordinate".
Which is what the linked article says.
>Sorry, but I am tired of the effort to make it look like Jansen's crime was infidelity.
Strawman. Nobody says that, and nobody cares.
Jensen's "crimes" that we know of are:
1. Having a sexual relationship with a person suspected of being a Chinese spy (who, allegedly, influenced NVIDIA's chip sales to China)
2. Having an undisclosed sexual relationship with a direct report
Both are huge liabilities for the company, as well as national security concerns (someone in a critical position putting themselves into a position for easy blackmail).
None are crimes, all are factors contributing to the firing decision.
>If he just went to whore house he would be fine (well, ignoring a possible expensive divorce).
Same goes for the ousted L3Harris CEO.
Who do you feel is creepy here (or a man, for that matter)?
Infidelity (in itself) is not the thing that got either of those 2 men fired.
That statement doesn't say anything about how anyone here feels about infidelity, nor whether it should or shouldn't be enough of a reason to fire a CEO.
I don't see anyone supporting infidelity here.
However, in a thread about Jensen, I've seen multiple people argue with me that the CEO having sex with subordinates isn't problematic at all (with total disregard for the power imbalance and potential for coercion).
That was, indeed, very sad.
I'm pointing out that looks like there is an effort to kind of turning this scandal as being about infidelity and then in next step conclude that infidelity is not illegal so "Jensen didn't do anything wrong".
The infidelity is bad and typically is connected with character, so somebody who does that is very likely unreliable in other ways as we can see.
Anyway the thing is that talking about infidelity is muddling what actually happened. The US considers this technology to be important for national security and now we are learning that the chips which supposed to be restricted were sold and are in China.
To illustrate the scandal, let's replace the chips with for example F-35 parts (which ironically there was already another scandal a while ago).
poor choice of words
Everything operates normally, as any other day.
This woodoo like belief you should not deploy on Fridays, Christmas, Valentine’s Day and other magical days is a disservice to the industry.
I feel like people want to go home on Friday and will make sacrifices they would not make on a Wednesday.
[1] https://www.l3harris.com/sites/default/files/2021-08/MN_SBSS...
(They also own a small number of private VHF stations for relaying company messages to air carrier operations domestically, but these aren't used for ATC purposes.)
Otherwise, the VHF radio links are operated directly by FAA TechOps.
L3Harris owns the telecommunications backhaul between facilities.
Rollout new router config Thursday night - seems fine at first - issues compound and then remote admin goes down
The Internet was purpose designed to tolerate disruption as major as a nuclear war, which it achieves through decentralisation.
Private networks exist to make idiot managers feel more confident while actually dramatically reducing availability by putting all their eggs into a single basket.
That is already well within the era of IPv6, let alone "the Internet".
There's no excuse.
But it does not make it 100% resilient to cascading failures or possible Layer2/3 loops that might happen during a software upgrade, especially in a country wide deployment.
The FAA will give a root cause at some point of why this happenned.
I wouldn’t say anything but this is approximately the only time in my entire life this scene will be relevant.
why a reboot would cause a crash? or it means that an update irreversibly broke the system and it was rebooted but that didn't help?
I learned more from this post in 15sec than I did in 20min from watching the Sec of DHS and Sec of Travel press conference
Looking at LAX departures, it looks like nothing has departed since about 10:30 AM PST, and everything later is showing Delayed or Cancelled. There are times after Delayed, but it's not clear those times mean anything. Some are now in the past.
"flysfo.com" is too overloaded to display departures. Stuck at "loading...".
JFK departure status shows almost solid "Delayed".
No good explanations anywhere.
Economy taking a lot of crazy hits this week. They're footgun hits too, not even enemy action.
Edit: ok so one of them was maybe a little bit enemy action.
Probably someone prompted an agent: solve global CO2 emissions :-)
5 days from now? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50465829
flights departing hawaii and alaska are also allowed
Maybe look further than Twitter.
The legitimate media from the New York Times to CNN and beyond all showed video of Markwayne Mullin's news conference 20 minutes before your post.
Sec Mullin: "What it appears to be right now is, as Sec Duffy and FAA was going in and putting patches into the system, they were putting new equipment and new technology. And that new equipment and new technology, it was overwhelming the older system. Which is why Sec Duffy made it very clear, the patchwork doesn't work. We need one complete system."
Sure, but the purpose of the tech policy office is to
argue why old systems (which have fixed maintenance costs)
should be replaced with new systems which goose the
economy when the federal government pays 10x for what they
should be paying.If and when things break you'll end up with an even bigger disaster if you don't have people prepared to maintain the old systems. A well managed decommissioning and upgrade is much more preferable.
In your mind maybe. Most are dead or retired.
New techs have been trained on splicing fiber and VoIP over the last two decades.
Nobody knows about vacuum tubes anymore either, that doesn't mean they were fired and had their pensions taken away.
The parts to maintain the legacy copper infrastructure are no longer manufactured and they are cannibalizing used parts for spares.
Not to mention the expertise for these systems have mostly either retired or in some cases passed away.
My grandparents still have a landline and the number of outages in the last 12 months has been insane. Some were in excess of a week.
Many such cases.
Sometimes the telcos have been shrugging their shoulders and refusing to perform repairs. This is common after a car accident takes out a pole, cabinet, etc. They accelerate the retirement to right now and force the customers onto new technologies.
https://static.wingify.com/gcp/uploads/abtasty/test-in-produ...
Because if it doesn't work, they call it out for bids
again, select their cronies and get kickbacks. If it does
work, then they've missed an opportunity for grift.Not only it takes lot of work, but to have the replica connect to the prod in some way to mirror identical behavior will possibly mean adjusting ATO, which is not a simple process in itself.
I'll be interested to see what the root cause of this all is, assuming it doesn't get buried. What I find both perplexing and predictable is how the finger has been pointed at Congress for not funding a replacement. Well, who's controlled Congress for the last 2 years? Who was president in 2017-2021? Who controlled Congress in 2017 and 2018?
If you want to dig deeper, this administration has also (unsuccessfully thus far) claimed in court that they're not bound by Congress when it comes to spending under the Impoundment Control Act.
I watched Sec Duffy's presentation, and it was appalling, but par for the course with this administration: in the middle of a major nationwide outage, he tried to blame someone else.
Even if Duffy got everything he wished for, how do you think they would upgrade a system as old and complicated as ATC. They would have to do it piecemeal anyway. This was a classic upgrade that broke shit. The problem was with the new upgrade, not the old shit that worked.
I agree with your view.
Over a decade ago I was an intelligence officer and the alarm bells were going off and it was exceptionally clear to the National security community that US infrastructure is barely holding on.
Clapper in 2013:
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/21491-document-90
Dan Coates in 2018:
https://www.euronews.com/2018/07/13/us-intel-chief-warns-of-...
Tip of the iceberg folks. Hold on to your butts…
Both things can be true: US infrastructure is in a dire place AND this monumental acute unforced fuck up is the fault of the unqualified, corrupt people who were put in charge of it
I think the problem with a lot of the push to "modernize" is we forget the legacy system has been real-world tested for 40 years now. It's the new stuff that needs to prove itself in terms of stability.
> if a piece of code (or hardware) has been working without fault in production
But we have tons of legacy code that our engineers don't like, yet it runs fine and has run fine for years.
Many forms of "touching" are tests that cannot be accomplished any other way, so untouched is untested, and if something can't be sanely turned back on after it gets turned off, that's just a latent, undetected fault.
This thinking caused an extended outage for the biggest mobile network in Australia: https://www.telstra.com.au/exchange/some-mobile-calls-and-da...
Those pair of boxes nobody was brave enough to touch cost them AUD 30 million in fines.
In my mind, anything that's not under continuous maintenance immediately begins to suffer from bit-rot and degrades steadily over time.
Of course, that's not a degradation of digital media, but the "dropping out" of concepts out of people's minds.
This is akin to Netflix's Chaos Monkey approach: systems under constant change and attack necessarily become robust. Systems untouched under glass like something in a museum are typically fragile and crumble if so much as breathed on.
Confidence comes from practice, not ignorance.
> “This isn’t going to just be be resolved and turned around within the hour"
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/11/13/us/ground-stop-natio...
That's a pretty low bar.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/lost-radio-contact-leaves-pilots-o...
(I was near ORD at the time, flying toward the outage area. We diverted to ORD, and the pilot was very friendly about it.)
At the time I thought it was Microsoft's fault, as Windows 95 and 98 were susceptible to crashing when GetTickCount() overflowed, and this ATC crash was due to a 32-bit millisecond counter on a Windows machine overflowing, but in this particular instance the system was apparently not running on a version of Windows with this particular bug and the failure was just an application error.
Aren't computers great? :)
I remember hearing of a fighter a long time ago whose autopilot flipped out when it crossed the equator, due to sin(latitude) becoming negative.
To really fuck up, you need a computer.
-- some clever person whose name I do not know
"Realistically you want fewer, higher-quality engineers who are educated in these tools and treat them with respect and caution. These tools are dangerous and you can’t play around. All it takes is one mistake and the blast radius is way, way larger. One mistake can do so much damage it undos all value of an entire year. Before downloading a malicious dependency was limited to deterministic behavior and could be scanned for. Now, you run a MCP server locally, it can prompt inject (in many different ways), and now your super powerful AI buddy is hacking you in ways a deterministic piece of malware could never. You could cripple entire companies through negligent use." And "And now we are controlling models that can be hacked in so many different ways and literally blow up companies. It used to be accountability the software wouldn’t break. Now it’s accountability that in creating the software we don’t ruin the business."
Not saying this was caused by malicious actors or negligent AI agent usage nor am I saying was the previous Microsoft outage either the above references but it doesn't look great. If our technology is really so brittle, we might be looking at a return to way slower world to put it simply. Maybe no remote work because it gets hacked too easy!
edit: https://www.fly.faa.gov/ois/oisedit/adv_oisedit_dis?number=1...
ATCSCC Advisory
ATCSCC 111 DCC 11/13/2026 NATIONAL GROUND STOP
EVENT TIME: 13/2053 - 14/0400
DUE TO EXTRAORDINARY CIRCUMSTANCES AND FOR REASONS OF SAFETY.
ATTENTION ALL AIRCRAFT OPERATORS, BY ORDER OF THE FEDERAL AVIATION
COMMAND CENTER ALL AIRPORTS ARE GROUND STOPPED. ALL DEPARTING
TRAFFIC SHOULD REMAIN GROUND STOPPED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. INBOUND
INTERNATIONAL FLIGHTS WILL BE MANAGED ON A CASE BY CASE BASIS.13/2053
?
Unrolling these decisions is a monumental task given the decades of hardware already deployed in the field that will only be upgraded when the current unit fails.
And with 1960s technology, this might just have been a very reasonable decision.
You'd say "Valid from the thirteenth at two zero five three zulu" over radio.
VZW and AT&T are moving full tilt in shutting down landline central offices.
Literally the gay dude from Airplane pulling the plug from the socket may have happened here.
Between the sectors administered by [smaller towers] are 20 contiguous areas of US airspace above 18,000 feet, each managed by an Air Route Traffic Control Center (ARTCC)...
A flight is handed off from one Center to another until it descends near its destination, when control is transferred to the TRACON serving the destination, and ultimately to the tower controller serving the airport.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_control_center
EDIT: someone below posted this, seems relevant -- the 'Radar multiplexer pipeline' that's on a "fast track" and an "aggressive track": https://www.sunhillo.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/SUN3125-... TL;DR: upgrading radio systems from old analog tech to new digital tech, I think?
https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=a519b8
It's Delta Airlines flight 1070
https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/DAL1070
Edit: It landed safely. Continuing to watch our airspace clear out, most traffic at 40,000+ feet is inbound international flights
It's eerie seeing the total number of aircraft tracked decrease. I put on a filter for 1000' to 80000', to exclude aircraft on the ground, and the number was around 12K when I started watching. It's down to just over 9.4K now. Wild.
Edit: 22 minutes later and the count is down to 8.4K.
Edit: I also never noticed balloons before. N804XR is kinda interesting, for example.
Oh-- there are two. N804XR and N807XR. Tethered Customs and Border Patrol aerostats. I'd never heard of these things before.
The house where I lived on 9/11 is in the approach for a runway at a local airport. Air traffic was a fixture at that house. Somebody was landing at all hours most days.
It was the strangest thing to have no traffic at all back in 2001. It's odd for the absence of a thing to be jarring but it was.
> "The government has been working to overhaul the outdated technology that air traffic controllers rely on since Congress approved $12.5 billion for the project last year."
> "Duffy has said that another $30 billion will be needed to complete the work, and the White House has begun lobbying Congress to approve it."
[1] https://apnews.com/article/flights-halted-airports-faa-f81b0...
A lot of very hardworking people getting too little pay for something so critical while their employers (some contracting company) take a lot of profit. Eventually they burn out waiting for help and a replacement system and retire or quit, then the systems really start failing because the knowledge leaves with them.
The FAA et al. have been working to modernize US ATC since ~2003. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Generation_Air_Transporta...
The next step is a ton of hardware upgrading, which always costs real money.
I was working on upgrading US ATC in 1995. As were lots and lots of other people.
If you don't take full advantage of that, you're missing out on possibly your only opportunity ever to fix whatever's needed fixing for years.
If things blow up because you're upgrading to something supposedly better and it goes wrong, then that's not a time when you can properly fix the new thing. You can only push forward with the transition or go back to the old. I disagree with "you've got nearly a blank check to do whatever's necessary to make sure it never happens again." You have a blank check, but anything you use it for has to be scoped within stopping the bleeding. As soon as you're onto the new or back to the old, the check expires and you likely can't touch anything real anymore because it'll be involved in lawsuits and finger-pointing.
I don't disagree with the core message, but I think it plays out differently for a major upgrade vs a production meltdown on an existing system. With mostly an existing system, you can pour effort into resilience. With an upgrade, I doubt people would let you beef up a system that is still on the chopping block, even if it's getting a life extension. And if you're still switching to the new system, all effort is going to go into getting it up and running and anything that gets in the way of that (as quality improvements are likely to) is going to face some serious resistance. The check is not truly blank.
You can spend years working on a problem but if you have a catastrophic failure in your personal life, you can use that to change dramatically with far less internal resistance.
However, this failure mode seems more likely to be caused by digital communication systems and an 'upgrade' (with commercial incentives) to newer technology.
My bet is that if short-wave radio transmission keeps being used, availability will be higher than stuff like Github.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/11/13/us/ground-stop-natio...
The press conference was started 10+ min late and the first 15 min was spent on blaming Congress instead of giving an update. Kinda frustrating for those who are affected and waiting to find out what they should be doing at the airport. The Q&A has been just an endless repeat of the same few lines of blame shifting. It’d be nice if they could actually give actionable updates.
> Transport Secretary Sean Duffy says the FAA "issued a nationwide ground stop for all US airports following a communication issue impacting all Air Route Traffic Control Centers.
Godspeed for everyone getting to where they need to be, somehow, or at least ending tonight with a roof over your heads.
edit: we're on approach into Seattle, so apparently we were one of the happy cases of the "case-by-case basis."
Most airliners over the ocean also have inmarsat satphones for the pilots.
After 1962 there was too much air travel to continue to shut it down for exercises, and NORAD switched to smaller, regional level things that did not shut down air travel after that. But the results of Sky Shield III in 1962 were the only experience that the FAA had to work from when they did the full ground stop after September 11th. Sky Shield III had tested how quickly air traffic control could clear the sky in the event of a nuclear war- the USAF had put up several hundred T-33 trainers, flying them randomly around the US and Canada, and then at a certain point in the exercise the ATC had to get them all on the ground far away from major metropolitan centers (presumed lost in the war).
Update: Starship launched on schedule.
I guess if some plane needs to do an emergency detour threw threw that space, but that seems unlikely.
edit: #121 does load eventually:
https://www.fly.faa.gov/adv/adv_otherdis?adv_date=11132026&a...
The Most Recent ATCSCC Advisory
ATCSCC ADVZY 121 DCC 11/13/2026 REROUTE CANCELLATION
MESSAGE: FC A001:STARSHIP_WEST HAS BEEN CANCELLED.
REMARKS: CANCELS ADVZY 036.
ASSOCIATED RESTRICTIONS:
EFFECTIVE TIME: 132305-140040
SIGNATURE: 26/11/13 23:05> The agency wrote on Nov. 10 that after the D.C. test, it will “now use SMART in the airspace of all 22 centers across the country to reduce delays, reduce fuel consumption and improve the travel experience for the flying public.” The tech was already being deployed at some airports.
https://gizmodo.com/the-faa-is-rolling-out-its-ai-air-traffi...
“NATCA believes any new technology should complement and not replace the experience, training, and professional judgment of air traffic controllers who are responsible for the safety of the National Airspace System,” the union said in a statement.
Seems like there are three plausible causes right now given the extremely limited communication from the govt.
1. The AI system rolled out yesterday had more access than publicly claimed and managed to break things.
2. The ongoing large scale equipment upgrade went wrong.
3. General incompetence from a department run by an unqualified realty show actor, within an administration that is actively hostile to expertise and experience in the federal workforce.
What could go wrong really...
> The FAA has reassured the public and airlines that SMART only suggests routes and doesn't affect air safety.
The destructive & arrogant behaviors won't be reigned in properly if we all fail to recognize that, just FTR.
That's just a scenario off the top of my head, it could be a lot of stuff. Plugging something new into an old, complicated system isn't risk free.
“Mr. Mullin said that new technology upgrades overloaded the existing, antiquated system, “overwhelming” the existing equipment.
“It’s going to continue to fail,” Mr. Duffy added. He also outlined many of the additional investments he believes the air travel system needs, like new air traffic control towers, infrastructure and communication networks.”
Of course they are all going to insist it has nothing to do with SMART, that would be incredibly damming, and threatening to ASI. But it’s pretty unfortunate timing no? What other “technology upgrades” have been recently applied to air traffic control/ communications?
Its more than likely that system is just created by some Trump donor and was purchased by the FAA to launder public funds to some company that Trump owes a favor too. Its not actually integrated with anything.
yeah... sounds about right.
Is there any evidence for this beyond a single statement from the govt? This administration hasn't exactly developed a reputation for fully accurate and truthful reporting.
Botched rollout of AI for ATC ...
or
Rollout of botched AI for ATC.
It sure didn't that long after every dev on earth started using LLMs for everything to turn to shit, so one may wonder...
The Trump twist is being brazen enough that those who get these contracts can just be his family members or buddies, but otherwise, pretty standard.
If your actual point is that it is costing too much and taking too long, you would be interested in Proposition 45, which limits the ability of local governments and individuals to endlessly delay the project. The LAO's analysis of that proposition is in https://lao.ca.gov/BallotAnalysis/Proposition?number=45&year...
"The FAA in June awarded Boston-based startup Air Space Intelligence a contract — worth up to $875.9 million — for an AI-powered tool to help air traffic controllers manage the nation’s skies and a related system for an FAA nerve center in northern Virginia to better handle plane congestion. The AI platform’s initial launch in the Washington area has sparked concern among Democrats in Congress who say it should be put on pause until they have a better understanding of how it’s being deployed."
"Over two dozen lawmakers have called on the FAA to pause its 90-day evaluation period for the platform, which began late last month in the Washington region. They say there’s been an “egregious lack of transparency.”"
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/10/15/faa-stake-ai-compan...
Feels like somebody was pushing their preferred company for a government contract and now is push for the government to invest.
Is this more common than I realize in US executive deparyments and agencies?
I've felt for most of my adult life that both parties have similar goals with decidedly different implementations. In this case, both want socialist combination of state and industry, even if they disagree with how to reach that goal.
I'm sure there is a reason for it but can they not be a little bit more specific?
I believe it's all virtualized today
I did a tour of Adelaide airport with Engineers Australia in the 1990s. We visited their obsolete IBM main frame, still running ATC in their computer room. They were tied to it by the certification of the software it was running. Just as you described.
Flight Service uses a different set of radios and can relay messages to ATC, but they've been slowly dismantled over the last two decades and wouldn't have the capacity to step in for an outage (nor should they be expected to - that's not their purpose).
Some aircraft have CPDLC for text-based communication, but it's asynchronous and you can't use that as a replacement for voice communication in the terminal environment. Also, many aircraft aren't equipped to receive it.
Pilots are trained on lost comms procedures, so if you're in the air and the radio fails they'd fall back to those regulations. Basically all the aircraft would fly their last assigned clearance, and attempt to deconflict manually with other aircraft over air-to-air radio (similar to flying into an untowered airport).
There are contingencies for radio outages, but yeah, everything going down at once (if that's what's happening here, which I doubt) is bad.
VFR traffic doesn't necessarily need radio, and is not affected by this groundstop.
As for lack of radio, this would only work if ATC blocked out your entire route from start to finish - which isn't practically ever done. Otherwise, they need to be able to maintain positive control over your flight since the airspace isn't reserved, which means conflicts are possible.
If you lose radio communication, it's an emergency and they'll move everyone out of your way. This doesn't work very well if everyone loses radio communication simultaneously.
Could you in an emergency, if you had no other options? Yes. But ATC can't legally give you a clearance that was dependent on using ADS-B for separation.
(Similarly, if there's a potential traffic conflict, and you tell ATC you see the other traffic on your ADS-B display, they just have to disregard that statement and assume that you can't see the other aircraft at all.)
I would hope that airports keep a battery operated radio + antenna in case of emergency with them, to at least communicate with aircraft within visual range of the airport.
So it falls back to local control, more in the style of visual flight rules. Pilots in existing flights will have to be vigilant and do their own deconflictation and new flights are banned out until the network is back up.
All conjecture at this stage of course, but all the radios won't just fail. It is probably going to be a poster child example about the dangers of large scale integration. The attraction of course is that integration is very efficient, the danger is it tends to fail all at once instead of in smaller pieces.
https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/tech/a-calamity-disrupting-hundr...
"we stuck digital computers into a purely analog pipeline, now with software containing a near-infinite amount of lines of code generated by LLMs, to make sure it's capable of a wide range of harrowing, incomprehensible failures."
And everybody here on HN applauds.
Digital Selective Calling is a 1980s technology. So it's not even XML stitched together with Java, it's way older than that. But it does mean two dozen boats and three shore stations can all communicate with each other without constantly stepping on each other or having to wait and hope you can talk to the person you want to before bad things happen.
There are fancier more modern systems in place for a lot of transit, but DSC is relevant here because it's an international system, a random cargo ship from Korea which turns up in the English Channel has the same DSC system as the boat which just arrived from Rotterdam. This is the same requirement we need in the air, a Singapore airliner and an Avianca airliner coming into San Francisco both need the same radio system.
https://www.sunhillo.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/SUN3125-... (page 3, bottom graphic)
(all the radars --> multiplexer [sadness here] --> radar data consumers)
Attention: National Radar Outage
Like if you're ordering a pizza they don't need the story of your day, why you chose pepperoni, or what movie you plan to watch. Somebody else might be interested, but not the pizza guy.
[0]https://gizmodo.com/the-faa-is-rolling-out-its-ai-air-traffi...
> [The] FAA also says a D.C.-based team of experts validates findings before they’re ever passed on to air traffic control, and the controllers retain the final decision on whether to accept SMART’s suggestions.
Seems unlikely.
There used to be a lot of invisible gatekeepers in a pre-AI world. At work, everyone can ask their agent to query SQL on databases that they were supposed to use through an application. The application and the security by obscurity(end users didn't know how to connect to the DB nor did they know SQL) were the gate keepers.
Under the hypothesis that some under-reviewed AI generated code made it into prod, the situation could be qualified as "engineers are panicking, because they don't know if they are the cause or not"
And the early reports describe the issue as related to ATC communication infrastructure.
I am watching planes stacked up on final approach to land at KBOS as I type. From flight radar 24 they are a mix of foreign and domestic. So incoming flights are clearly being managed here.
Does this imply some potential risk from inbound international air traffic? Or maybe the FAA meant outbound? Something else I am missing?
(Sure, a flight near the Canadian or Mexican border could in theory divert to a Canadian or Mexican airport, but it's unlikely many people on those flights have their passports with them.)
In which case freezing domestic (and the huge amount of load it contributes to ATC) but keeping international normal makes sense.
Of course... the side effect is the "fun" that creates for incoming international flights with domestic connections...
There must be some procedures in place for this - I pretty regularly take domestic (Canadian) flights that pass over the US where I don't carry my passport.
The intent around the ground stop is to reduce in-air U.S. traffic.
As for asking already airborne flights to turn around, those coming in over the ocean might simply not have a non-US alternate airport available with their fuel remaining, so that's often not an option.
Oceanic flights are planned so that at every point along the route, the aircraft can lose an engine or cabin pressure and still reach a pre-approved diversion airport with enough fuel, with the flight plan marking the points where turning back versus continuing becomes the faster option. If a diversion is needed mid-ocean, the crew offsets from their assigned track and altitude to stay clear of other traffic, then heads to the nearest suitable airport, such as Gander, Keflavik or Shannon over the Atlantic, or Anchorage, Cold Bay or Midway over the Pacific.
Alternate airports are picked based with regards to all kinds of contingencies (many of them meteorological), but "the US closes literally every airport" is not one of them.
Depending on the nature of the disruption it may be they simply have drastically reduced capacity to handle traffic so landings may be much slower and they'll manage the traffic based on various priorities.
Flight EY8 from Boston to Abu Dhabi https://fr24.com/ETD6PX/429055e2
So my guess this is what it means "case by case". Some which are close to destination would be manually routed, others will land in different places.
Hawaii was the early/late splashdown site and pre-cleared: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/spacex-launches-starship-flight...
SpaceX released the early return around 4 p.m. Pacific: https://x.com/TrackingTheSB/status/2121392533418786992
HDOT phrased it badly, but there was a window today where Starship could have aborted over the west coast in the middle of this shutdown.
Is it something else?
(i.e. Unloading to tarmac, buses)
Speculation on my part, they just rolled out their SMART air traffic routing system. https://www.flyingmag.com/faa-smart-ai-now-active-at-22-artc...
Bet the increased strain on data polling from this system is the culprit for increased traffic.
It is possible that this overwhelming was caused by a software or configuration error, no doubt.
I think that if that's the case, rather than failing upwards and going for a full simultaneous upgrade with a 50B congress bill, the brakes should be stepped on a little bit, continue the partial migration as long as there are no issues. Or at least wait until the start of a 4year administration to go for a rehaul, so that you can stay around if things go fubar.
Transportation secretary Duffy says that the smart system is unrelated. That the smart system is a dashboard for displaying all the data from across the air traffic system. My questions is obviously where is the smart system getting its data from...
I suspect FAA pushed for the new AI system, didnt take into account the increased traffic demand to feed the system. Aging infra isnt sufficient to handle the increased demand. Now Duffy is trying to deflect blame unto someone else.
Should be an easy answer. We saw increased traffic from X and we've implemented Y to ensure it doesn't happen again.
Instead it was vague hand waving around old hardware and funding.
Even if they don't have all the details organized, what was done to fix the problem? How was the 12b spent thus far and what where does the additional 50b number come from?
Or maybe don't start with demanding money. What happened? How was it fixed? What is being done to ensure it doesn't happen again? Then mention this shit needs fixed and we'll be working with Congress for additional funding.
It was interesting that Mullen mention new technology contributing at one point. Sounds like someone made a mistake somewhere and this press conference was purposefully vague or they really don't understand what happened yet (doubtful).
Plenty of critical systems operate reliably on old tech as long as you work within the limitations.
This press conference had maybe 30s of actual info and the rest was this antiquated system is fucked even though it's been working for years and the only way to move forward is $50b. :shrug:
They did hurriedly mention it was "new patches" in the midst of their deranged ranting and finger-pointing (at...their own party, a point Duffy was visibly taken aback by when told by a reporter). When they vehemently insisted it was 'not SMART' one has to presume they meant that the hasty execution of their haphazard AI rollout was performed unintelligently.
> old system give us money
> probably not a cyberattack btw
> not SMART related
> we've opened the airspace but this is gonna be slow
just ended actually as i was typing this, that's pretty much it
They didn't.
I expect it to be a combination of extremely poorly funded and sidelined IT infrastructure trying to use a bloated AI system from a hype company. Which results in everything breaking and poor schmucks already at the end of their rope working to fix something they barely understand.
It doesn't take a genius to see the problem is the new AI system. Whether or it's the "AI" part of the system isn't really relevant system this new system was vibe-coded by AI and built around the "AI" features.
Highly doubt this. Unless you mean sort of like education in many areas where the system is robustly funded but the money doesn't actually reach the people doing the work on the ground.
Yeah of course I mean this, I mean the guy who had to serial connect to whatever shit show was running and was sitting there trying to parse error logs.
FAA has been doing this for decades. A single electronics box, or even a couple should not drop the system. Maybe for the time it takes to remove and replace.
After hearing the press conference "some new stuff was plugged in and the legacy system could not handle it" or alternatively 'a mistake was made that just so happens involved non today equipment, but we want more money'
Do you really need the government to solve that problem for you? Just book another flight.
It's possible this is the standard "privatize a government function and skim the profits" move but some of this stinks of union busting and trying to reduce the amount of influence air traffic controllers have whenever the organized criminals that run our government want to have a shutdown but keep their private jets flying.
Suffice it to say - there's no reason to trust any of these people when it comes to taking care of critical government functions.
Not sure if this was the the exact quote, but I see AP wrote, "introduction of some new technology into an old air traffic control system overwhelmed it." Despite that, the whole conference, on loop, they were insisting that the problem is entirely the old hardware and this is why they need billions to overhaul it and rebuild from scratch.
But my completely unfounded and more conspiratorial theory, based on zero knowledge of air traffic control systems, is that to better accommodate SMART, L3Harris was strong-armed into to rolling out a hastily written patch on a Friday, which accidentally took down the system.
The secretary also mentioned that the new system should be brought altogether, and not piece by piece. Which would lend credence to an incompatibility between both systems.
What am I missing?
As a postmortem, once the dust has settled, is the time to ask for more funding/support
I don't doubt that the system needs upgrades, but these people should not be involved.
Is it more likely that decades old hardware failed coincidentally or that the first rollout of a new AI tech went wrong within a number of hours because the test environment didn't have sufficiently scaled load testing?
https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2026-09/M...
The Senate will be in session for four more days next week before the Thanksgiving holiday, and then back for the first three weeks of December before the 119th Congress adjourns for good on Dec 18th. So basically, after two full years with control of both branches of Congress and the WH, this bill was introduced on the very last week of the regular Congress calendar. After which the lame duck Congress would only meet for about four weeks until adjournment.
Not really stalled, more like procrastinated until days before the election (when everyone is scared to vote on anything), hoping that the lame duck Congress (notoriously unproductive period generally) would force it through in a rush?
Doesn't seem like a great strategy if they actually wanted it to pass. Especially since a budget CR is needed before Dec 11 which will dominate members' attention in the remaining time (plus the permitting bill BAAJA).
Maybe things are moving fast today and they didn't have time to understand and communicate accurately, but at some point soon I think we deserve a more in depth explanation.
Unclear what happened but they have old equipment. Only Duffy can fix it, he needs $50B from Congress to do it and they can't fix it overnight. They can't guarantee it won't happen again.
LAX hasn't restarted yet. Departures are either "Cancelled" or "Delayed".
All information about this is from PR teams. Nothing from reporters who cover airports. Nobody from airport management, airline operations, FAA operations people, or somebody who just got off shift at a control tower. People who might actually know something. There was a briefing at the White House, and it was all cabinet secretaries. "Instead of reassuring an anxious public, and providing concrete information, this briefing appears to be intended for President Trump’s approval" wrote a New York Times reporter.
FAA policy prohibits anybody but PR people talking to the public. The details of that policy are not public.[2]
[1] https://www.ops.group/blog
[2] https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/orders_notices/inde...
And several from IAD Dulles. https://www.flightradar24.com/UAL992/4290a5d2
All seem to be international though.
https://apnews.com/live/ground-stop-aviation-flights-news-up...
Edit: If you look now over the north atlantic you can only see outbound flights
> The Weather Service “has not experienced a disruption to its radar systems today,” said Kim Doster, the spokeswoman.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/11/13/us/ground-stop-natio...
https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-national-weather-servi...
https://www.news9.com/oklahoma-city-news/national-weather-se...
Given that the FAA issue also apparently relates to communications, it does seem like it might be related.
This article is very likely misreporting the US National Weather Service radar outage page you can find people reposting elsewhere in this comment section. The NWS page has been updated to say it does not reflect a current issue. Anecdotally, my local NWS weather radar is working fine. Also, weather doppler radar and ATC "radar" are very, very different technologies.
https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/ground-stop-chicago-oha...
>The US National Weather Service said on Friday it was experiencing nationwide internet and communications problems that could prevent users from accessing products on its websites or cause outdated information to be displayed. Technicians were working to resolve the problems as soon as possible, the NWS said in a statement.
Edit) landed pretty uneventfully.
https://blog.rodmena.com/entry/time_division_multiplexing_ho...
My flight to the US is listed as Delayed but there are two flights to Canada that show Contact the Airline. Bewildering.
Current as of 1340 PDT:
ATCSCC ADVZY 117 DCC 11/13/2026 ALL CENTERS EXTENDED FLIGHT PLAN DROP TIMES IMPLEMENTED
MESSAGE:
EVENT TIME: 13/2120 - 14/0500
CONSTRAINED FACILITIES: ZTL
DCC HAS IMPLEMENTED EXTENDED FLIGHT PLAN DROP TIMES TO 240 MINUTES
FOR ALL ENROUTE CENTERS DUE TO NATIONWIDE COMMS FAILURE.
EFFECTIVE TIME: 132121-140530
SIGNATURE: 26/11/13 21:21So the flight planning system is having problems.
But also, this is about when the flight plans expire out of the system if they're not activated for departure - so it's saying unused flight plans won't be deleted for 4 hours, so pilots won't have to refile for departure.
This will ease the pain of getting things moving again, assuming they fix it by the time the 4hr window passes.
There's a query form for looking up old advisories, and it's not returning anything for the last 15 days.
Aviation is global, and we still need to interop with countries and airports that still use actual teletype. So the legacy protocols still remain, even though much of it is tunneled over IP links now.
Also: The keyboards used in both airplanes and in ATC facilities are often special reduced-footprint keyboards without shift/caps keys. (They're also often ABC layout rather than QWERTY.) So there's that, too.
However, AFTN (used for disseminating flight plans and weather between ATC facilities) still uses landline modems running TTY-originated protocols.
In the US we've moved moved off AFTN in favor of AMHS/X.400, as have most countries - but my understanding is there's still some last holdouts that haven't fully switched over.
Also, everyone is used to reading the upper case so they would have to spend some time learning what common things look like in lower.
ATCSCC ADVZY 120 DCC 11/13/2026 NATIONWIDE GROUND STOP
MESSAGE:
EVENT TIME: 13/2245 - 14/0400
DESTINATION AIRPORT:ALL
FACILITIES INCLUDED: ALL
EXPECT UPDATE:0400Z
REASON: COMMUNICATIONS FAILURE
REMARKS: 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.
EFFECTIVE TIME: 132246-140430
SIGNATURE: 26/11/13 22:46EVENT TIME: 14/0116 - 14/0130 DESTINATION AIRPORT:ALL FACILITIES INCLUDED: ALL EXPECT UPDATE:0400Z REASON: REMARKS: THE FAA COMMAND CENTER NATIONWIDE GROUND STOP HAS BEEN CANCELLED. EFFECTIVE TIME:
140119-140200 SIGNATURE:
26/11/14 01:19
We are experiencing technical difficulties. We apologize for the inconvenience but please check back soon, as we are working to have the issues resolved.
Thank you, FAA Web Operations Team
Notably, the problem was described as "routers overloaded with data". When directly questioned if this could be a cyber attack or rogue ai agent the Sec/Homeland responded "there's nothing completely certain now."
“FAA says it will phase out floppy disks from air traffic control”
And I don't see anyone arguing about overall funding, only arguing about who to throw millions or billions of additional dollars at chasing vague ideas of how to improve things based on what politicians and C-suites, who have no experience in the area, claim they can do. To me it looks more like grifting for contracts and kickbacks than any well thought out plans to improve things.
Edit: screenshot here: https://i.postimg.cc/XqcsDQw9/image.png Edit 2: different link still showing: https://www.fly.faa.gov/ois/oisedit/adv_oisedit_dis?number=1...
EVENT TIME: 13/2100 - 14/0300 USERS CAN EXPECT AIRBORNE HOLDING TO ANY AND ALL AIRPORTS WITHIN THE NAS DUE EQUIPTMENT OUTAGES. UPDATES WILL BE ISSUED AS ADITIONAL INFORMATION BECOMES AVAILABLE. EFFECTIVE TIME:
132120-140330 SIGNATURE:
26/11/13 21:20
Edit: end date of tomorrow??? Is that just temporary?
https://www.fly.faa.gov/ois/oisedit/adv_oisedit_dis?number=1...
maybe the last two numbers are a time range for which the thing is effective? and it's over now?
EFFECTIVE TIME: 132054 - 140430
SIGNATURE: 26/11/13 20:54
Insane. It looks like they are showing no advisory on first page view, then advisory? Can others confirm?
That being said they started up flights to Alaska and Hawaii earlier than the continental US flights.
It is a frontpage post. That's where I saw it.
BTW, Uber surge pricing felt absurd in this situation.
> Los Angeles Airport and Las Vegas’s Harry Reid International were among those that were closed, according to a list on the regulator’s website.
> The outages at O’Hare and Midway were listed as “due to equipment outage”.
https://www.ft.com/content/c9b119ff-d1da-46a7-b2b3-4ad0544ff...
They don't spend a dollar more than they need to so extra gates for this would be quite the luxury. I guess what they need though is apron space or hangar space for the extra planes and the number of gates won't matter so much.
Gates were quickly full, ground ops to pull empty planes off gates takes quite a while, and about 90 mins later, we are pulling into our scheduled gate.
Surely they don’t think it’s more reliable than something on the consumer market.
Feels like we’re living two alternate realities seeing these issues when high speed satellite internet on planes is an option.
Obviously being on the internet doesn’t imply open access
It's actually quite impressive, you have to really try to be so bad at your job of building redundant systems that some failure mode implausibly affects everything nation wide, yet allows Canadian domestic flights to proceed fine.
If the communications issue is between US ATC regions, this makes sense. The planes are being handed off to other non-US ATCs where there is no communications issue.
Obviously quite ai generated but really fun! If anyone has other things you want added or researched post below.
As in what’s the most responsibility you’ve ever been given to not screw something up - obviously if you did screw it up. Still very interested to hear the story.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vThhccsTanAz...
AI is updating it hourly. Since it is AI, always verify yourself.
effective 2:54PM - 10:30PM central time
ATCSCC Advisory
ATCSCC 111 DCC 11/13/2026 NATIONAL GROUND STOP
MESSAGE:
EVENT TIME: 13/2053 - 14/0400
DUE TO EXTRAORDINARY CIRCUMSTANCES AND FOR REASONS OF SAFETY.
ATTENTION ALL AIRCRAFT OPERATORS, BY ORDER OF THE FEDERAL AVIATION
COMMAND CENTER ALL AIRPORTS ARE GROUND STOPPED. ALL DEPARTING
TRAFFIC SHOULD REMAIN GROUND STOPPED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. INBOUND
INTERNATIONAL FLIGHTS WILL BE MANAGED ON A CASE BY CASE BASIS.
EFFECTIVE TIME: 132054 - 140430
SIGNATURE: 26/11/13 20:54EDIT: Time line doesn’t add up for this. Likely unrelated
"... ground stop is in effect for all destinations until further notice due to rolling frequency outtage in multiple centers..."
and
"... the ground stop is now a nationwide ground stop for all centers, all destinations until further notice due to widespread frequency outtages.. ..."
https://x.com/Anna_Giaritelli/status/2121344915091206311
Which is cited in the Hindustan Times (leading Indian newspaper), which refers to the Twitter source as a journalist.
https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/us-news/faa-issues...
----
(EDIT: @mods / @dang: Around January this year (iirc) somehow my account ended up rate-limited, posts relatively demoted (start low, drop quickly), vouches/flags relatively ineffective, etc. Usually I don't care too much and haven't bothered to do anything about it but it is sometimes annoying - it limits participation - and right now it buries some of the more valuable information in the discussion. Could you look into fixing it? I don't know of a reason this account would be penalized. Thanks.)
https://www.cnn.com/2026/11/13/us/live-news/flights-ground-s...
But I'm completely just spitballing here.
https://status.flyio.net/incidents/01M76HANB3XQC6WYKPA69WQN8...
A sequence of events:
- Democrats win congress : it sets a clock to act before January
- Jensen is taken out, throwing nVidia into chaos
- Email comms are blacked out for an entire day across government and major enterprises
- Air traffic is stopped nation wide the next day
Trust me I have the instinct as well. The PLA flew like 30 jets into Taiwan's aviation alert zone yesterday so I'm primed for any smell of something worse, but the fact is there's no reason to connect events barring evidence.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/11/13/us/ground-stop-natio...
That tool was first unveiled for the Washington, D.C., area airports two months ago, on a day when problems with air traffic communications failures also grounded hundreds of flights, after a circuit failed and it was discovered that contractors had accidentally ripped through a fiber line that was supposed to serve as its backup.
https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/modern-skies-trumps-transportat...
(from Bloomberg)
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/11/faa-expands-ai-advice-to-...
You need to wait for the third shoe to drop.
I wish more was being done on partition tolerance. Consistency is over rated.
[1] https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/reaping-the-whirlwind-in...
Having it degrade into regional systems would be a nice property, but risks making a complex system more complex. Put all of your eggs in one basket and then make sure it's a really good basket.
> "FAA expands AI advice to manage air traffic congestion across entire US airspace"
* https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/11/faa-expands-ai-advice-to-...
> "FAA Is Rolling Out Its AI Air Traffic Tool Nationwide"
* https://gizmodo.com/the-faa-is-rolling-out-its-ai-air-traffi...
Because American infrastructure is modern, well designed, maintained and funded? Because government is competent and rational? I could absolutely believe that would happen.
--- EDIT:
This could just be the first issue that's arisen -- the FAA announced it "is expanding across the nation" on Tuesday. Which could really mean anything.
FAA Announcement: https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/statements/general-statements
The Ars Technica article behind the Gizmodo one sadly doesn't have more info, either.
It'd be kind of absurd if a read-only integration took down nationwide infrastructure, but A) we've all been there... and B) the gizmodo article does mention they're also trying to phase out floppy disks for some jobs still, which tells me their CI/CD and rollback hygiene might not be top-notch. Hopefully the Real World contestant in charge of our transportation network is on site with a ClaudeCode terminal as we speak!
It does sound pretty deeply integrated, I will say:
SMART is a cloud-based system that centralizes 200 data streams – including weather patterns, flight paths, traffic flow, and controller staffing metrics – into one platform.
Creates **a single shared real-time picture** of schedules, weather, airport capacity, and airspace conditions.
...
Enhances the effectiveness of **existing** FAA air traffic management systems.I could see AI deploying something that just obliterates those systems with requests.
If so we are really speedrunning into idiocracy with AI.
And the early reports describe the issue as related to ATC communication infrastructure.
If you agree to their nominal leadership and a 1% tax then they go away and even add you to an honorary galactic charter.
US-bound flight from YYZ. They shut down #2 engine and parked us in inactive runway. Pilot came on and said he was reading something about "ATC radio frequency issue" but has been told by United ops that it'll be cleared in ~30 min from now.
Last time this happened in July it was due to some network handoff issue so maybe there is some fiber cut somewhere? (My friend said last time it was NE corridor Verizon fiber cut.)
Definitely nothing to do with the current administration, they are hampered by their $16 billion allowance.
So it was the AI?
- [0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-forgotten-operating-syst...
Weather service down.
Frances fridges down.
Microsoft down.
Would they tell us they were getting hacked, if this was a prelude to war ?
Or would they just say "issues yet to be determined" ?
Interesting times ladies and gentlemen.
Or, this is just what everyone that said "dont move everything into the cloud" warned about.
Yeah, probably that. :|
The US is already at war with Iran. France blamed Iran for the fridge hacks too
Everybody knows attacks are coming from Iran and Russia regularly, it's not a conspiracy theory
Who could have seen this coming?
A freak FUBAR of legacy systems, an unfortunate alignment of circumstances that could have happened anytime.
Pessimistic (paranoid) cases:
1. Intentional hacking by a foreign adversary 2. Vibe coding whoops 3. OpenAI agents "running experiments"
Optimistic case: the FAA is telling the truth and it was a simple FUBAR
Pessimistic cases: remain the same, they just won't tell us :-)
In this time of high corruption and near-zero trust in officials, it seems wild to suppose it was just a random glitch. I would bet this links to corrupt government contracts.
Claude: Transmogrifying…
Shall I stop all trains too?
Cogitated for 50s · done 14:53 PM
Except Dominoes.
The boarded and grounded planes may start disembarking passengers at some point, especially if their crews are hitting their maximum time before mandatory rest. These delays will probably prevent replacement crews from arriving.
Sure smells like something foreboding
> Airlines said flights in the air would continue.
This is a huge relief! phew
Flight EY8 from Boston to Abu Dhabi https://fr24.com/ETD6PX/429055e2
There’s still lower ground telecoms for take off.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-faa-says-it-will-phase-o...
What do you mean by not working exactly?
Not sure.
Update: https://www.foxnews.com/live-news/faa-issues-nationwide-grou...
"What it appears to be right now is as secretary Duffy and FAA was going in and putting patches into the system, they were putting new equipment, new technology, and, that new equipment new technology it was overwhelming the older system".
So, it was a careless update, probably the one deploying their new 875 millions AI tool.
And no journalist at the conference picked that up.
"They were putting new equipment um and uh new um......technology"
https://www.reddit.com/r/germany/comments/1udup2j/trains_hal...
...so at least it's not something 911-ish
We are run by morons.
Also he says he saw a plane taking off LAX so fingers crossed. Still no news though
This also happened on 9/11 which is curious because the NVIDIA thing caused a public rift with Lutnick yesterday:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/bessent-blames-lutnick...
Besides popularity isn’t the determination of whether something is a good idea or not. The Korean War for example was very unpopular yet it was the right and smart thing to do.
Company that created the tool (called Airspace Intelligence) is interesting in terms of demographics for these types of companies - implies lots if the tool 'does not work as designed' (which it will obviously not)
https://www.linkedin.com/company/airspace-intelligence/peopl...
Unrelated I only fly ocunus because I don't want a blue haired pilot.
It looks like the FAA started testing it in DC in September and annouced a nationwide rollout three days ago (https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/statements/general-statements). This makes it seem more unlikely to be the cause, though:
A team of FAA specialists in the SMART center in Washington, D.C., analyzes and validates the SMART data and provides scheduling recommendations to the agency’s Air Traffic Control System Command Center in Warrenton, VA. The Command Center then routes these recommendations to air traffic control facilities for local leadership to consider.
And the early reports describe the issue as related to ATC communication infrastructure.
...And Claude, remember NOT to make NO mistakes.
When we are dealing with the FCC, grounding all flights and radio failures in open bands, you can drive a lot of changes.
There are a lot of pesky ESP32s out there, right? Did your company choose to go with the Espressif platform? You know, the hackable SDR one that crashes planes and clubs baby seals and tries to sell your grandparents bad financial scams?