FAA issues nationwide ground stop due to "extraordinary circumstances" | Hacker News Reader

FAA issues nationwide ground stop due to "extraordinary circumstances"

axios.com

125 pointsowenshen2436 comments

Does anyone have any insight on this? Currently at LGA and they’re continuing boarding procedures, but they’re not giving us any updates otherwise.

Radar outage:

https://www.weather.gov/afc/radaroutage

A national radar outage would do it. This would be a bigger story. Everyone needs it to forecast. However it doesn't seem to actually be offline. So I don't think it was a very long outage if it did go down.

How do a bunch of separate radars all go down at the same time? Aren't they spread around the US?

I'm thinking it was "the website went down" issue.

weather radar still works for weather channels..

The floppy disk upgrade went wrong

Rotfl!

I can still access NOAA radars just fine.

I think I remember seeing an article here about air traffic controller systems moving off of 3.5" diskettes. Related ?

"upgrade to cds. make no mistakes"

No, my guess is cyber attack from a state we've been making false accusations against.

Which one?

Too many enemies to guess at this point

Can you fill in the blanks here? My attempt: "China would never spy on us, but because of the implication they would put 50k of our citizens currently in the air in mortal danger"?

It's not a credible thesis, at least not given the info we have. Tier 1 cyber enemies would have done something more subtle (so as not to trigger a kinetic warfare response or a response in kind) or something so obvious that they announce it with a declaration of war.

It's far more likely that the creaky old civilian radar infra has problems or some old single point of failure (maybe an old mainframe) has/had downtime. There are 3 widely rumored causes of this FAA outage (with seemingly no evidence) related to projects that the Feds were already working on making: (1) an AI air traffic controller assistant, (2) migration to something newer than 1970s floppy disk tech, (3) migration away from radar to GPS for controllers).

All of these are more likely than a foreign cyber team attacking FAA systems in this way.

So, "We have met the enemy and he is us?"

Homeland Security saying "telecommunications" outage. But nothing more at this point...

microsoft yesterday, funny.

Jensen the day before that, funny.

Is this the first such case since 9/11?

no, there was one in 2023 when a pilot notification system went down

No.

"January 11, 2023. All U.S. departing flights were halted for several hours after a computer outage crashed the FAA's Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) pilot notification system"

9/11, 2023 and today are the only three times.

July 19th 2024 crowdstrike/microsoft update issue halted a bunch of (all?) flights in the US also (coincidentally 6 days after presidential assassination attempt)

Not due to a requirement by the FAA but by the airlines being dependent on their windows computers, right? Legally, you were still allowed to fly, I think.

9/11 was different, that also required all planes to land, more or less, as quickly as possible and not continue to their destinations (unless that was timely, I suppose). This one is a departure ground stop, no more planes going up. Planes in the air haven't been ordered to land yet.

Some more discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50489641

Something with frequency of ATC signals?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50489641

earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50489641

I'm not saying it was aliens, but it was the aliens.

Dear Unix users, "man 6 atc" won't solve it.

First, the Microsoft outage. Now this.

Extraordinary.

Not extraordinary, at least not given the little information we have now.

Even the hyperscalers (AWS, Oracle Cloud, CloudFlare) are down about once every 5 years for as long as Microsoft Office was yesterday.

The FAA has systems older than I am and they are known to have at least 3 major upgrade projects in the works.

Could this be related to what caused Outlook to go down?

Yep. They run on the same floppy disk.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com