All flights in the United States are grounded until further notice “due to extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety,” the Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement.
The FAA issued the ground stop “following a communication issue impacting all Air Route Traffic Control Centers,” Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said in a social media post. “FAA technicians are investigating the issue.”
Air Route Traffic Control Centers are regional facilities that handle flights going across the country.
“Traffic should remain ground stopped until further notice,” the FAA said in an advisory. “International flights will be managed on a case by case basis.”
I wonder if this is about Microsoft outages lol
Shouldn’t that have happened yesterday when the Microsoft outage started?
Nominally yeah but cascading failures can be delayed or like the other guy replied to me it could be fall out of data breaches if the Microsoft outage was CVE related
The federal government does use outlook and teams. My bet is the “outage” was actually a cyber attack and some used it to get a lot of information.
While the air traffic control systems aren’t Microsoft powered all the related administrative bits are. So someone may have detailed information on how to access those systems
Edit: Being reported as a communications outage
Microsoft has specifically stated it wasn’t a breach so they’d be especially fucked in that case.
I mean I don’t trust them not to lie their ass off. Corporations aren’t particularly trustworthy
You can usually trust their statements, not because they said so, but because they get sued into oblivion and what they say/do is extremely critical to those lawsuits.
Microsoft spends a metric fuckton on legal to protect against this kind of risk.
Nobody is bankrupting them through the courts.
When publically traded companies issue offical statements that are outright falsehoods that materially impact share price, shit can actually hit the fan. A lot of uberwealthy people own a lot of MS stock and fucking with rich people’s money is one of the few ways a rich person can actually catch jail time in the US.
Its not about bankrupting, it’s about getting the high ranking bean counters scared. And that’s not hard, in fact it’s beyond easy.
Never attribute to maliciousness what can be more easily attributed to incompetence.
“We need more defense spending” is where the reflective assumption that we’re under attack inevitably leads. And after throwing hundreds of billions at the NSA, if you believe we’re still easily suseptible to a national grid failure, what will another billion towards state security achieve?
I don’t think we need more money thrown at defense or that the NSA was effective at anything.
Attacks can still happen though
My pet theory is that non-US AI has caught up to mythos and can basically hack enterprise and government systems. Things that were unhackable because of complexity and/or being written in obscure coding languages are now easy targets for an agentic swarm. The last time we shut down all air travel was 911 btw. Just sayin’
It was actually in 2023 due to a glitch keeping pilots from being able to upload flight plans, but it was short.