That's a little unfair to IBM – sure, you're just as beholden to them for life, but at least the service engineer gets to your rack before you know something's gone wrong!
@nxobject I meant litterally. The ATC system is derived from the IBM 9020 which was itself a set of interconnected System 360 systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_9020
That explains the outage. We're just in one of the 5 days of the year they don't cover...
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.
There isn't really one. This is a system that's supposed to have it's own built in redundancy and must not go down.
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).
Technically, you do not need radios. There are many many uncontrolled airports in the United States, where you can technically fly around without establishing two-way radio communication. It’s doable, but I don’t know if that’s even a scenario pilots test in the simulator during their semiannual trainings.
Most air traffic is IFR. You definitely need radio for IFR traffic in for deconfliction in most of the world. (There's a few exceptions in very remote places, but that's mostly academic.) Even legacy procedural (non-radar) separation assumes you have working radio, and a radio failure is an emergency.
VFR traffic doesn't necessarily need radio, and is not affected by this groundstop.
You don’t need radio for IFR (as the whole point of a flight plan is that if you lose contact you continue to fly your plan). But you kind of do need radar.
Right, but isn't a lot of that necessary radio aircraft-to-aircraft, like ADS-B? Obviously not ideal, but I thought IFR traffic could feasibly maintain separation without ATC help.
AM Radios are literally everywhere, and very commonly available.
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.
I would bet the problem is not strictly the radios themselves, they will still work, Planes can talk to each other and directly to airports, But that there is a large scale highly integrated control center network that failed, and planes can no longer talk to centralized traffic control.
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.
I'm wondering if this is another case of delayed Y2K, where the system suddenly thinks the century part is 19 instead of 20 for a two digit year of 26.
They use third party telecom providers to relay communications between ATC “centers” and remote radio transmitters. It is not purely AM radio and outages have occurred in the past, most recently in September.
"modern" -> "we stuck digital computers into a purely analog pipeline to make sure it's capable of a wide range of harrowing, incomprehensible failures."
> "modern" -> "we stuck digital computers into a purely analog pipeline to make sure it's capable of a wide range of harrowing, incomprehensible failures."
"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."
I don’t think that it’s the wrong idea in general. AM radio (and humans sitting on either end) is going to struggle with the sheer amount of air traffic we have today.
This message was pulled from a ATC communications system ordering the stop. These are terse direct communications for professionals who don't need or have time to read the story of what's going on. The news, not having any initial sources besides this is just reporting it, at the time they had no more information.
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.
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 20:54
> 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.
Hate that for all involved. Was flying out of ATL when the Crowdstrike clusterfuck imploded Delta's antiquated crew scheduling backends. Not a fun night.
Godspeed for everyone getting to where they need to be, somehow, or at least ending tonight with a roof over your heads.
The flight crew on my LHR-SEA flight "still expects to land in the US." The lack of conviction in that expectation was audible. I don't get the impression that they're being told very much, but maybe that's literally a consequence of the "communication issues."
edit: we're on approach into Seattle, so apparently we were one of the happy cases of the "case-by-case basis."
Secretary of Homeland Security just assured a press conference that all planes in the air will be dealt with on a case by case basis. Some may be prioritised.
I'm seeing some diversions on Flightradar24. E.g. DAL2195 from Tampa to LGA was diverted to Harrisburg. But some flights are continuing to their original destinations.
We were offered $1500 to get on a later flight and I’m so glad I didn’t get to the counter on time to take them up on it. Saw the news reports a half hour before landing.
>I can't believe people actually think outlook being down would take down all departures across the US
Because American infrastructure is modern, well designed, maintained and funded? Because government is competent and rational? I could absolutely believe that would happen.
If true and this ends up lasting an hour or more, that's going to be undeniably, objectively hilarious. At least they used to keep the planes running on time!
--- 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.
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.
The fact sheet has two more vaguely worrying bullet points -- I would say such wild speculation is unwarranted, but I struggle to think what else could cause all the radios in the nation to go down at once... Emphasis mine:
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.
Oh boy, that feels plausible. Some of these legacy systems are pretty fragile and aren't designed to be queried heavily outside of well established patterns.
I could see AI deploying something that just obliterates those systems with requests.
If so we are really speedrunning into idiocracy with AI.
Doubtful. That tool likely suggests "improved" clearances, which a controller can use at their discretion. It likely does not control clearances directly.
And the early reports describe the issue as related to ATC communication infrastructure.
There's enough space, but not enough gates. If they think the stop may end in a reasonable time some planes will be pulling away from their gates even without a departure time to make room for the landing planes (or rather, they will have missed their departure time and not have a new one). Landing planes will be able to disembark, and probably won't be boarded again until it's resolved and enough departing traffic has cleared that it's obvious that those flights won't be canceled for today as well.
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.
Yes, and they'll probably do that at some point if they can't get them to the gates. Again, it'll depend on how long this lasts. They will also have to get in more crews to support that since this is not normal and not something they would have planned on in their staffing schedules for a Friday afternoon/evening.
No, and when Netflix goes down it's not a false flag due to their fear of people running their own Plex servers. Perhaps you just have anxiety about losing something you depend on, so you're projecting.
>The FAA has issued a nationwide departure ground stop “due to several impacts to ATC Frequencies and/or Radar capabilities,” the Air Current reported, referring to air traffic control systems. The FAA command center said it does not have further information on the “timing or cause of this outage,” the publication said.
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.
Airplane software is some of the oldest on the planet, pre-dating anything that would be considered a best practice. When you see something weird in the space, assume it is because someone in the 1960s thought using more than two characters world be a profligate waste of space.
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.
> When you see something weird in the space, assume it is because someone in the 1960s thought using more than two characters world be a profligate waste of space.
And with 1960s technology, this might just have been a very reasonable decision.
It's a format called "Date-Time Group" (DTG). Used in military, I think it dates back to teletypes, and is better to say over radio than modern ISO formats.
You'd say "Valid from the thirteenth at two zero five three zulu" over radio.
The TLDR is that punchcard operators found the DTG date format convenient. Punchcard sorting is easiest when the consecutive bits encode the sort key, and the DTG format is easy to split into different sets of bit ranges corresponding to common business logic.
Same here, I get it only on some refreshes, otherwise it shows "no advisories". I hope that's not the main path these things are disseminated normally.
Oh nice, very helpful. The sibling thread mentions that this problem is specific to "ARTCCs", which are not the towers at airports but rather central hubs:
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.
Wikipedia mentions they in particular use special "very high frequency aviation bands" (around "AM 118-137 MHz"), which is presumably why they're all linked together. It also mentions sharing systems, but no clear specifics that I can find. Certainly doesn't disprove the botched rollout theory, tho...
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?
That’s obviously not what’s happening. But if this upgrade is really implicated, the real question would be where the line of accepted residual risk for an outage like this was drawn.
Well sure, but I wouldn't be shocked at all if someone greenlit a plan that wasn't supposed to involve closing the airspace, but which failed and which had an insufficiently thought out rollback plan.
Due to "rolling frequency outtage" [sic]: From a claimed photo of FAA documents (I replaced the all caps with lowercase):
"... 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.. ..."
(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.)
My wife's plane was about to take off (moving) but then stopped. I just messaged her to check once I saw the news. Sounds like the people onboard weren't given any info as to why. They're still on the runway waiting.
Physics says all planes land. I guess eventfully would be diversion (maybe to Canada lol) or Mayday Fuel (but you probably won't know it happened anyway - it just means some reserve fuel will be used).
>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.
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.
Of course, these may be the ATC analog of claude code approvals, or they may be overstating the level of human oversight/HIL - but the overall situation seems likely more serious/unclear than something like this. I'm not sure I'd call vibe air traffic control going haywire an "extraordinary" circumstance, though certainly extraordinarily stupid.
Doubtful. That tool likely suggests "improved" clearances, which a controller can use at their discretion. It likely does not control clearances directly.
And the early reports describe the issue as related to ATC communication infrastructure.
Did the Starship launch today just ground all flights in the USA? Maybe, maybe not. I am convinced it did. If Elon Musk can take a shred of evidence, or just make shit up, and change domestic and foreign policy, then why can't I?
We obviously live in a simulation after all, what does it matter?
Maybe the simulation overlords programmed us to put a buggy NOTAM out, which is what apparently happened in 2023, but now it was supposed to be fixed thanks to all this efficiency!? NOTAMs usually go out beforehand. You know, as a notice.
Again, who knows. We can barely make enough Cybertrucks according to demand, the simulation overlords are busy.
I was actually expecting it to be from the Microsoft 365 outage. Non technical people have a bad habit of inserting email as a critical step in a process.
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.
Yep those are the last two. In 2023 it was because of a contractor deleted some file and caused NOTAM to go down, and 2001… well we all know what happened
There were three NORAD exercises (Sky Shield I, II, and III) in 1960, 1961, and 1962 where all civil aviation across the US and Canada were grounded for several hours (the 1961 one was 12 hours, 1960 was 6 hours and 1962 was 5.5 hours). This was with several months of advance notice. These were exercises to test how effective NORAD would be at engaging Soviet bombers. While they publicly announced that they were 99% effective, in actual fact no more than a quarter of the bombers were even engaged before they reached their target. This evaluation was not declassified until the 1990s.
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).
I wonder if this will close the Starship launch window starting at 5:45pm EST. The FAA issued the commercial launch license earlier today. That launch is under a separate set of "commercial space rules", but presumably they need to coordinate with air traffic control.
I mean they should already be in a situation where no planes are scheduled to fly there, and now there will be even less planes. So seems like an ok situation for them.
I guess if some plane needs to do an emergency detour threw threw that space, but that seems unlikely.
The nifty thing about stories is that they don't have to be about something directly to trigger strong feelings in your crowd or listeners.
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?
This week alone, I've seen multiple servers fail due to hardware issues: multiple bad fans, a failed hard drive, bad network optics. Another server got bumped while an adjacent server was being worked on and lost time sync, leading to software instability/crashes. We don't have a large fleet, but we do have more servers than employees, and issues add up. We don't need any help with instability, entropy has us covered, thank you very much.
I do not really understand what the FAA means by “inbound international flights will be managed on a case by case basis.”
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?
I suspect they mean that inbound flights from international airports may still take off (probably in part because the FAA can't _really_ stop them, in part because the volumes are much lower and thus more manageable, and in part because one might hope that by the time it takes to get to the US from many international destination, the incident will be resolved).
Very unlikely that any international flights bound for the USA are taking off. Probably many are turning around or diverting if they are not more than halfway there.
I'm not following this very closely, but I've not seen any reports of diversions for domestic flights, so I think it'd be unlikely for international flights. The report is just for a ground stop, which is just a stop in departures; normally a ground stop would allow flights already in the air to travel to their normal destination.
That reasoning doesn't really make sense. A flight from outside the US that is inbound could divert to a non-US airport that isn't impacted by whatever is going on, depending on where they are and what their fuel status is. A domestic flight doesn't have a non-US airport to divert to.
(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.)
Ah, my point was more that if the action being taken isn't "get planes on the ground _now_" and so the US airspace remains open for traffic already in the air, then it's unlikely they're trying to get international planes to either divert or return.
> (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.)
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.
A domestic US flight can still divert to Canada. There usually are special arrangements that allow people on a diverted flight to stay short-term while the situation is resolved, even if they don't have the required documents or visas.
That is interesting and why i was wondering if they meant outbound flights but screwed up the language. I had assumed (probably wrongly) operators who should be risk averse would not want their US bound flights taking off under these conditions.
Presumably it means they may allow some international flights to the US to depart if they expect the issue to be resolved by the time they are in US airspace.
Doesn't seem like it; I've seen several international flights land in JFK alone since this started. (On the other hand, these might simply not have enough fuel left to divert to any non-US airport.)
Not in the industry, but I think ground stops might actually not be a regular/automated procedural thing for inbound international flights in the way that they are for domestic flights.
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.
Yes, but most of them are not viable in the late stages of a flight. Planes aren't carrying enough fuel to cross an ocean for a second time; most don't even have the capacity.
The diversion airports are chosen specifically for each stage of the flight, so a flight doesn't ever need to return to where it came from.
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.
Please suggest an appropriate international alternate for a plane just about to land in Denver with an hour of fuel remaining.
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.
I think it's more mundane than that, I assume they mean that certain international flights will be turned around or redirected while others will complete their route. Say a flight just an hour underway London to New York might be turned around while one nearly at its destination may be allowed to land.
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.
Probably just means that if you're less than halfway across the Atlantic, you can turn around and go back to Europe. I really wouldn't suggest reading too much into the phrasing.
Maybe they mean inbound international flights may be allowed to take off from their origin, on a case by case basis. Usually a clearance is required to take off from both the origin and destination.
> The FAA has reassured the public and airlines that SMART only suggests routes and doesn't affect air safety.
> [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.
Depends if an AI DoSed an important service or not.
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.
While I don't have insider knowledge of this particular deployment, there was a strong industry-wide push towards "ship unreviewed AI generated code and hope for the best", partly driven by the fact that AI writes code faster than humans have bandwidth to properly review.
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"
Doubtful. That tool likely suggests "improved" clearances, which a controller can use at their discretion. It likely does not control clearances directly.
And the early reports describe the issue as related to ATC communication infrastructure.
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 21:21
You can definitely file a flight plan later than that. 30 minutes before departure is the recommended filing time (per AIM 5-1-6), but you can even file for an immediate departure. It's just that at less then 30 minutes additional delay is possible, depending on backend handling and human processing. But in most cases the strip will print within a minute or two of submitting the flight plan.
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.
It means that flight plans (which include departure time) will stay in the system longer after the departure times are missed, so that IFR flight plans will not need to be re-filed. In other words, flight plans have a longer TTL.
This will ease the pain of getting things moving again, assuming they fix it by the time the 4hr window passes.
Most of these systems started out as teletype printers, back in the day. The teletype systems only had an all-caps character set.
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.
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 22:46
"Today's event is therefore generally being described as the third nationwide grounding event since September 11, 2001, counting 9/11 itself. The three incidents differ significantly in cause and scope."
More info on AP [1]. Looks like a comms issue. The figures they quoted for the overhaul are absolutely insane - almost $45 billion (I used to work in telecom):
> "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."
When the system is held together with chewing gum and 1980s-era software, when it fails, "someone screws up" is not a fair reaction. Of course it fails! The wonder is that it still mostly works.
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.
Snark aside, this is actual advice in Crisis Engineering by Nitze, Weaver, and Dickerson, and largely matches my experiences as well. You can harp on and on and on at upper management about why budget or attention needs to be allocated to take care of something before it blows up into a much bigger problem, but they'll never move on it -- until it actually does blow up, and then suddenly you've got nearly a blank check to do whatever's necessary to make sure it never happens again.
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.
I’ve seen figures that estimate the aviation industry to provide about $1.5 trillion worth of GDP for America, so 4-5 billion dollars. Feel free to double that for the cost of dealing with unexpected disruptions and loss of institutional trust.
It's because air traffic control systems in the US haven't been significantly upgraded in like a century. Keep kicking the can it will get more and more expensive
Wouldn't that have been taken into account when the $12.5 billion was allocated? Or was the $12.5 billion just meant to be the first allocation and they knew substantially more would be need later?
I'm hearing some discourse about "outdated infrastructure" and increasing investment because most systems are analog and not digital.
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.
My wife is on a plane on the ground at ORD (they just landed) and they have been told they can use the restrooms but can't get off the planes. Any reason why folks wouldn't be allowed to deplane at the end of the journey if it was a radar or comms issue? They can pull up to the gate using flags . . .
This seems like one of those efficiency-vs-resilience problems. Sure, it's "more efficient" (in cost) to use the same empty/fill process for every plane, but when nobody can leave, some extra capacity to unload planes would help.
You don't have to go to a gate to deplane and this is an extremely rare event. They'll just pull up a staircase and have them deplane to a shuttle eventually.
We are 6th in line waiting for a gate while they tow grounded planes off of the gates. Normally those flights would have departed and we would get a gate fairly quickly, but if no one is taking off, then they need to move them, and potentially deplane the (angry) departing passengers.
The only time I've spent long stretches on a grounded plane have been at ORD. It's such a busy airport than any disruption to the schedule just causes all sorts of chaos.
Any three of those pessimistic scenarios seem plausible though. Frightening. Intentional hack/exploit of air traffic control systems is the first thing that came to my mind when I first saw the news.
We are experiencing technical difficulties. We apologize for the inconvenience but please check back soon, as we are working to have the issues resolved.
I have no idea whether this particular failure was Microsoft's fault, but I was in the air on September 14, 2004 when a substantial portion of the southwestern US's air traffic control went down:
(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.
> A computer is a device that enables a person to make more mistakes faster than any previous invention, with the possible exception of the combination of handguns and tequila.
"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!
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.
Verizon Wireless is out here as well ("SOS"—thankfully my UA flight has Starlink).
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.)
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?
This happened to me a few minutes ago. I clicked that link, it said "no advisory", I was making the same comment you made, then tried refreshing and the advisory came back.
Insane. It looks like they are showing no advisory on first page view, then advisory? Can others confirm?
It seems that the adv/ pages are not loading any advisories, though I am just guessing and have no idea how this is meant to work. The fact that the search page has a date input would seem to imply historical advisories should be shown. If you go to https://nasstatus.faa.gov/ and click the Advisory links for any of the active events that have one, they all show as blank too. Could be totally wrong though.
No, please stop engaging in baseless and pointless speculation. If the US wants to bomb Iran it doesn’t need more reasoning than it has already used to already do what it has done.
No they don’t - popularity isn’t all that relevant. The president can just order strikes tomorrow.
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.
> In a notice posted on its website, the agency said technicians are working to resolve the disruption as quickly as possible.
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.
I'm watching it live on ADSBexhange, here's a flight I picked at random going approximately past me that'll land in Detroit about an hour from now... there's not much left over the US over 40,000 feet. Only 2 planes over Indiana at that altitude right now.
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.
This tracks with what I has seem elsewhere. I don't have the details handy now, but the communication system used for long range handoffs for flights above 18,000 ft seems to be what is impacted. Keeping planes below that deck would keep them bouncing more frequently between shorter range towers but at least still tracked and in communication.
I'm also near Detroit and am watching the trackers and I'm pretty sure I just saw N831AK take off from Troy Oakland in violation of the grounding order. I wonder how common that is.
I did see another statement where Mullin said this doesn't look like a malicious act, which just makes it even more weird that he's sort of taking point. Maybe the Real World actor leading transportation is in over his head?
Info on this is amazingly sparse. Apparently Sec. Duffy posted something on X/Twitter, and that's all the news media have.
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".
Sec of Homeland Security gave an interview about 10 minutes ago saying it's indefinite, they don't know the cause, and to expect resolution to take a while.
SFO had delays this morning because of winds. I'm not sure if LA also had bad weather, but SFO had a lot of rain and if you know SFO, you'll encounter a delay if someone sneezes in the direction of the runways.
Makes sense. CNN reported that international airlines were still departing for North Atlantic flights, apparently because they use a separate communications system.
Yeah, oceanic flights largely use satellite-based CPDLC today, or HF voice as a fallback, but not VOR in any case (which I suspect is the implicated system here).
I wonder if it was Claude or ChatGPT? My money would be on the latter. Anthropic seems to generally have better security and guardrails, and apparently OpenAI’s newest cyber model is extremely capable.
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.
Listening to SFO Tower, the latest info I’ve heard is an expected stop until 04:00 UTC, but flights departing to Asia via west departure may be permitted to depart.
I've read scattered reports of other flights also taking off from the east coast.
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.
Botched rollout of AI for ATC announced yesterday as rolling out nationwide?
> 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.
However, the National Air Traffic Controllers Union (NATCA) said it has not been “involved in the design, testing, or implementation of SMART and therefore cannot speak to its effect on the air traffic control workforce.”
“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.
That seems like pretty important context actually, and is a surprise to me.
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.
"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."
I don't see why they would care about the NATCA's evaluation of the system. As a union, they have a vested interest in protecting the employment of traffic flight controller workers more than public safety.
Even assuming they don’t care about public safety at all, their members are still going to have to work with it, and happen to be among the world’s leading experts in air traffic control, weirdly enough.
The fact that the union (a separate political and legal entity) wasn't involved in the assessment doesn't mean that air traffic controllers weren't involved.
To me, it’s like asking the hand weavers worker union about the benefits of incorporating mechanical weavers in their workflow. They are the experts of weaving, but still…
Except some airports haven't enough free gates for disembarking as planes that wanted to take off were denied. So they tried to go back to their gates. As a result some planes in the air are being diverted to less-busy airports.
That system just makes suggestions and isn't actually integrated in any ATC system. This is a telecom issue.
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.
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.
> That system just makes suggestions and isn't actually integrated in any ATC system. This is a telecom issue.
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.
SMART developed by ASI and the FAA is pushing to own a portion of the company:
"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.”"
NYT: "In a social media post on Friday, the company [ASI] said, 'The current ground stop is not based on or a result of the SMART system, any product of ASI or our integration with FAA and ATC.'"
It would be super awesome if I could hop on an airplane without getting my insides x-rayed, my belongs sorted through or damaged, worrying about the windows falling off or the plane's systems flying itself into a crash, or some tech bros' bid to be a billionaire telling what an understaffed ATC controller what to do.
AI tech is nowhere near reliable enough to be introduced in such important systems. I find this deeply troubling even if it’s not related to the current issue.
Personally I fail to understand how we could possibly benefit from a non-deterministic AI system, when normal computer systems are more than capable of managing a 3-dimensional airspace using nothing but basic math. Smells like pork for sure :/
If a lot of planes on the ground were prohibited from taking off, but couldn't get back to their gates due to congestion/traffic, where will the planes go that are still in the air and ultimately land? Just disembark passengers out on the tarmac? (hopefully with some sort of bus pickup)
I know we're all having fun in the comments. But please think about this next time you vote, local/county/state/national. There are people in charge who are not funding upgrading these systems, because their constituents don't want their taxes raised to pay for it. That lack of funding is annoying to some, has an enormous economic impact to many, and is now risking tens of thousands of lives who are literally up in the air. There are planes carrying body parts destined for transplant that are grounded. People who need to get home to their families. All because nobody wanted to pay for what we knew we needed to fix.
One thing to add is that this is bipartisan: both parties have failed to adequately fund ATC updates, and it sometimes feels like there's more interest in vanity projects than fundamental infrastructure funding and solving personnel shortages (ATC is a very difficult career, and the pay, benefits and prestige are not incredible. Fewer and fewer people are choosing to go into this very critical line of work).
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)
We paid more than $800MM for "route suggestions", btw, a problem that doesn't seem to benefit at all from "AI"—a term reserved for fantastical algorithms. Surely you could solve this with traditional search algorithms without sacrificing your dignity!
Maybe just paranoia but it seems slightly suspicious for this to happen while we are in the middle of discussing massive funding and overhauls to the air traffic control systems. This will certainly end up pushing a lot more funding into these programs and companies now that were trying to sell more expensive systems.
I guess we will see what happened in the aftermath. But I very much doubt the current problem has anything to do with a lack of funding.
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.
Fox News says that Markwayne Mullin says that the FAA says that it's not a cyberattack, and it's not something like 911. Just heard that, don't have a page to point to at the moment...
What does this mean outside of the US, I.e. I suspect planes that should be in places abroad won't be so ongoing cancellations and crew in wrong places etc.
dumb question but do the airport gates get "too full" if all plans are grounded? Do airports sort of expect some constant turnover to have enough open gates to service everything? Do you end up with a line of plans waiting for a gate?
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.
Very, very much yes. Most busy airports will start having problems with gate capacity due to just normal delays. We definitely don't have the capacity to have every active flight in the country parked at a gate.
Based on my current experience on the ground at AUS, yes.
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.
Is conjecture allowed? I have no evidence of this, but I've noticed that often before big meetings between superpowers one side or the other seems to do a minor or subtle attack as a kind of sabre-rattling/warning to the other side to try to gain leverage (and show them they're not to be trifled with). So with that, I wonder if this is a China/NVIDIA accusation connection.
If tomorrow there is third major outage of an important infra-structure level service, maybe I will start to get a little conspiratorial about cyberattacks and such.
It is hard to not rapidly spiral into pure conspiracy theory territory, but one has to ask how many "black swan" events can you accept within a period of a few days before you start to question things?
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
Too much pattern recognition. Lots more things have happened in the world as well over the last month, just because you heard of some of them doesn't mean the ones you heard of are connected.
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.
About 15 mins ago I got off BART at Daly City and a plane took off from SFO and flew overhead. Didn't look like anything special, just a regular passenger jet to me.
Is this going to end up being the work of rogue Anthropic or OpenAI agents that “unexpectedly” escaped so they can regulate open weight models under the guise of preventing them from doing the same thing 6 months from now?
There was a time when we'd get clear and honest communication about this but now our admin is Baghdad Bobs all the way down. They will lie about it, even if there is no rational reason to lie about it, because this admin and the movement associated with it wants you eternally guessing what the truth is.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
ChrisArchitect | 2 hours ago
lazystar | 2 hours ago
paxy | 2 hours ago
I'm sure there is a reason for it but can they not be a little bit more specific?
PLenz | 2 hours ago
RobotToaster | 2 hours ago
PLenz | 2 hours ago
genxy | 2 hours ago
bee_rider | an hour ago
nxobject | 2 hours ago
xattt | 2 hours ago
PLenz | 2 hours ago
I believe it's all virtualized today
femto | an hour ago
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.
lacoolj | 2 hours ago
ivanjermakov | 2 hours ago
uxhacker | 2 hours ago
mirekrusin | 2 hours ago
sparkling | 2 hours ago
tjohns | 2 hours ago
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).
lxgr | 2 hours ago
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.
rationalist | 2 hours ago
calfuris | 2 hours ago
teeray | 2 hours ago
LPisGood | an hour ago
tjohns | an hour ago
VFR traffic doesn't necessarily need radio, and is not affected by this groundstop.
bombcar | an hour ago
valleyer | 52 minutes ago
tjohns | 5 minutes ago
jasonjayr | an hour ago
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.
somat | 56 minutes ago
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.
gordonfish | 2 hours ago
Jtsummers | 2 hours ago
kunai | 2 hours ago
onionisafruit | 2 hours ago
mikeocool | 2 hours ago
chasd00 | 2 hours ago
anamexis | 2 hours ago
lxgr | 2 hours ago
CircuitSeuss | 2 hours ago
antonvs | an hour ago
spaceywilly | 2 hours ago
https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/tech/a-calamity-disrupting-hundr...
pests | 2 hours ago
NateEag | an hour ago
TacticalCoder | 56 minutes ago
"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.
afavour | 11 minutes ago
toomuchtodo | 2 hours ago
https://www.sunhillo.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/SUN3125-... (page 3, bottom graphic)
(all the radars --> multiplexer [sadness here] --> radar data consumers)
mzs | an hour ago
Attention: National Radar Outage
https://www.weather.gov/afc/radaroutage
12_throw_away | an hour ago
mzs | an hour ago
silverFork | an hour ago
toomuchtodo | 57 minutes ago
52-6F-62 | 2 hours ago
colechristensen | 2 hours ago
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.
caned | 51 minutes ago
dmitrygr | 2 hours ago
effective 2:54PM - 10:30PM central time
brianshaler | 2 hours ago
smallerize | 2 hours ago
carimura | 2 hours ago
actinium226 | 2 hours ago
chasd00 | 2 hours ago
jbredeche | 2 hours ago
smallerize | 2 hours ago
> 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.
lacoolj | 2 hours ago
jbredeche | 2 hours ago
the_mar | 2 hours ago
lazide | 2 hours ago
kevvok | 2 hours ago
kevvok | an hour ago
ethbr1 | an hour ago
Godspeed for everyone getting to where they need to be, somehow, or at least ending tonight with a roof over your heads.
ssttoo | 2 hours ago
jsolson | 2 hours ago
edit: we're on approach into Seattle, so apparently we were one of the happy cases of the "case-by-case basis."
greggsy | an hour ago
dboreham | an hour ago
_delirium | an hour ago
sleepytimetea | an hour ago
tjohns | an hour ago
Most airliners over the ocean also have inmarsat satphones for the pilots.
jsolson | an hour ago
lxgr | an hour ago
Melatonic | 37 minutes ago
lxgr | 8 minutes ago
pimlottc | an hour ago
jondwillis | an hour ago
downrightmike | an hour ago
condour75 | an hour ago
CobrastanJorji | an hour ago
_blackhawk_ | 26 minutes ago
jmclnx | 2 hours ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50489678
binsquare | 2 hours ago
https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/ground-stop-chicago-oha...
guybedo | 2 hours ago
vkgcr | 2 hours ago
nout | 2 hours ago
joshbuddy | 2 hours ago
lunarboy | 2 hours ago
krapp | an hour ago
Because American infrastructure is modern, well designed, maintained and funded? Because government is competent and rational? I could absolutely believe that would happen.
jacquesm | 2 hours ago
ceejayoz | 2 hours ago
bbor | 2 hours ago
--- 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:
The fact sheet has two more vaguely worrying bullet points -- I would say such wild speculation is unwarranted, but I struggle to think what else could cause all the radios in the nation to go down at once... Emphasis mine:llama052 | an hour ago
I could see AI deploying something that just obliterates those systems with requests.
If so we are really speedrunning into idiocracy with AI.
augment_me | 2 hours ago
903543958568 | 2 hours ago
eli | an hour ago
dysoco | 2 hours ago
nsoam | 2 hours ago
aschla | an hour ago
And the early reports describe the issue as related to ATC communication infrastructure.
llama052 | an hour ago
actinium226 | 2 hours ago
sharmajai | 2 hours ago
Jtsummers | 2 hours ago
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.
verzali | an hour ago
Jtsummers | an hour ago
etaioinshrdlu | 2 hours ago
gdulli | 2 hours ago
LPisGood | an hour ago
runningmike | 2 hours ago
colechristensen | 2 hours ago
(from Bloomberg)
augment_me | 2 hours ago
temp0826 | 2 hours ago
throwitaway222 | 2 hours ago
edit: https://www.fly.faa.gov/ois/oisedit/adv_oisedit_dis?number=1...
lxgr | 2 hours ago
tniemi | 2 hours ago
franze | an hour ago
13/2053
?
Maxion | an hour ago
dcrazy | an hour ago
0cf8612b2e1e | an hour ago
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.
lxgr | an hour ago
And with 1960s technology, this might just have been a very reasonable decision.
0cf8612b2e1e | an hour ago
agildehaus | an hour ago
You'd say "Valid from the thirteenth at two zero five three zulu" over radio.
bmurray7jhu | 30 minutes ago
goldfingeroo7 | an hour ago
brendoelfrendo | 2 hours ago
lxgr | 2 hours ago
adamsb6 | 2 hours ago
lxgr | 2 hours ago
sfink | 29 minutes ago
mikeyouse | 2 hours ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/s/HUT3wjABQ6
kulahan | 2 hours ago
inamberclad | 2 hours ago
chinathrow | an hour ago
sippingabonedry | an hour ago
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.
_s | an hour ago
d1sxeyes | an hour ago
bbor | 2 hours ago
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?
londons_explore | an hour ago
lxgr | an hour ago
CobrastanJorji | an hour ago
bbor | 34 minutes ago
deepvibrations | 2 hours ago
ryanschaefer | 2 hours ago
java-man | 2 hours ago
cobychapple | 2 hours ago
lacoolj | 2 hours ago
mmooss | 2 hours ago
"... 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.)
sigmarule | an hour ago
jondwillis | 2 hours ago
Edit) landed pretty uneventfully.
1-6 | 2 hours ago
onionisafruit | 2 hours ago
loloquwowndueo | 2 hours ago
hysan | 2 hours ago
polarsanel | 48 minutes ago
silver92bullet | 2 hours ago
underseacables | 2 hours ago
causal | 2 hours ago
temp0826 | 2 hours ago
odyssey7 | 2 hours ago
mulderc | 2 hours ago
russellbeattie | 2 hours ago
You need to wait for the third shoe to drop.
mmh0000 | an hour ago
eli | 2 hours ago
Waterluvian | 2 hours ago
pseudonimous-pr | an hour ago
DebtDeflation | 2 hours ago
camdenreslink | 2 hours ago
brendoelfrendo | 2 hours ago
inamberclad | 2 hours ago
aschla | 2 hours ago
eli | an hour ago
DebtDeflation | an hour ago
>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.
silver92bullet | an hour ago
12_throw_away | an hour ago
DebtDeflation | an hour ago
jbredeche | 2 hours ago
sigmarule | 2 hours ago
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:
Of course, these may be the ATC analog of claude code approvals, or they may be overstating the level of human oversight/HIL - but the overall situation seems likely more serious/unclear than something like this. I'm not sure I'd call vibe air traffic control going haywire an "extraordinary" circumstance, though certainly extraordinarily stupid.eli | 2 hours ago
aschla | an hour ago
And the early reports describe the issue as related to ATC communication infrastructure.
wolpoli | 2 hours ago
Aboutplants | 2 hours ago
consumer451 | 2 hours ago
Weird things happen when you destroy the federal infra, aka the USA.
Am I being hyperbolic? Well, this was the first national ground stop since 9/11... and for what?
solid_fuel | 2 hours ago
slopinthebag | an hour ago
consumer451 | an hour ago
https://fedscoop.com/faa-aviation-safety-system-doge-notam/
Did the Starship launch today just ground all flights in the USA? Maybe, maybe not. I am convinced it did. If Elon Musk can take a shred of evidence, or just make shit up, and change domestic and foreign policy, then why can't I?
We obviously live in a simulation after all, what does it matter?
slopinthebag | an hour ago
consumer451 | an hour ago
Again, who knows. We can barely make enough Cybertrucks according to demand, the simulation overlords are busy.
sigmarule | 35 minutes ago
talon8635 | an hour ago
stefan_ | an hour ago
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.
cheesecakegood | 2 hours ago
TuxedoBuddy | 2 hours ago
hasteg | 2 hours ago
el_benhameen | 2 hours ago
mandevil | an hour ago
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).
testtestmetest | 2 hours ago
delichon | 2 hours ago
Update: Starship launched on schedule.
adgjlsfhk1 | 2 hours ago
antonvs | an hour ago
HPsquared | an hour ago
bombcar | an hour ago
nbaugh1 | 2 hours ago
TuxedoBuddy | 2 hours ago
allenrb | 2 hours ago
blurbleblurble | 2 hours ago
greggsy | an hour ago
marcellus23 | 2 hours ago
aschla | an hour ago
chasd00 | an hour ago
asoberbeck | an hour ago
panick21_ | an hour ago
I guess if some plane needs to do an emergency detour threw threw that space, but that seems unlikely.
mzs | 47 minutes ago
edit: #121 does load eventually:
https://www.fly.faa.gov/adv/adv_otherdis?adv_date=11132026&a...
cjs_ac | 2 hours ago
> 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...
deadbabe | 2 hours ago
soundworlds | 2 hours ago
Aboutplants | 2 hours ago
deadbabe | an hour ago
jgerrish | an hour ago
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?
hermitdev | an hour ago
drillsteps5 | an hour ago
jamesinmn | 2 hours ago
soundworlds | 2 hours ago
delis-thumbs-7e | 2 hours ago
ChessGenome | 2 hours ago
Aboutplants | 2 hours ago
dude250711 | an hour ago
If you agree to their nominal leadership and a 1% tax then they go away and even add you to an honorary galactic charter.
HeyLaughingBoy | an hour ago
rajay99 | an hour ago
cogogo | 2 hours ago
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?
waiwai933 | 2 hours ago
SoftTalker | 2 hours ago
waiwai933 | an hour ago
kelnos | an hour ago
(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.)
waiwai933 | an hour ago
ethbr1 | an hour ago
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...
Marsymars | an hour ago
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.
tavavex | an hour ago
the_mar | an hour ago
cogogo | 15 minutes ago
jameshart | an hour ago
ralph84 | 2 hours ago
aschla | 2 hours ago
The intent around the ground stop is to reduce in-air U.S. traffic.
fanatic2pope | 2 hours ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Yellow_Ribbon
Wistar | 2 hours ago
lxgr | 2 hours ago
lxgr | 2 hours ago
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.
aschla | an hour ago
lxgr | an hour ago
aschla | an hour ago
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.
lxgr | an hour ago
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.
aschla | an hour ago
12_throw_away | 42 minutes ago
colechristensen | 2 hours ago
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.
streetfighter64 | 2 hours ago
asmithmd1 | an hour ago
Flight EY8 from Boston to Abu Dhabi https://fr24.com/ETD6PX/429055e2
donalhunt | 24 minutes ago
Romario77 | an hour ago
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.
bombcar | 59 minutes ago
greggsy | an hour ago
itopaloglu83 | an hour ago
pwillia7 | an hour ago
jumploops | 2 hours ago
[0]https://gizmodo.com/the-faa-is-rolling-out-its-ai-air-traffi...
ceejayoz | 2 hours ago
> [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.
abirch | an hour ago
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.
llama052 | an hour ago
MetaWhirledPeas | 2 hours ago
bink | an hour ago
fatherzine | an hour ago
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"
aschla | 2 hours ago
And the early reports describe the issue as related to ATC communication infrastructure.
Animats | 2 hours ago
Current as of 1340 PDT:
ryanisnan | 2 hours ago
Animats | 2 hours ago
So the flight planning system is having problems.
tjohns | an hour ago
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.
geocrasher | 2 hours ago
This will ease the pain of getting things moving again, assuming they fix it by the time the 4hr window passes.
Animats | 2 hours ago
There's a query form for looking up old advisories, and it's not returning anything for the last 15 days.
pandemic_region | an hour ago
Symbiote | an hour ago
tjohns | an hour ago
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.
shrx | 20 minutes ago
tjohns | 9 minutes ago
Animats | an hour ago
carimura | 2 hours ago
skc | 2 hours ago
joquarky | an hour ago
subzero06 | 2 hours ago
armcat | 2 hours ago
> "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...
chasd00 | an hour ago
sailfast | an hour ago
kulahan | an hour ago
AnimalMuppet | an hour ago
Jtsummers | 54 minutes ago
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.
ethbr1 | an hour ago
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.
intrasight | an hour ago
I was working on upgrading US ATC in 1995. As were lots and lots of other people.
thaumaturgy | an hour ago
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.
sfink | 6 minutes ago
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.
greggsy | an hour ago
LPisGood | an hour ago
pvab3 | 43 minutes ago
fourthark | 18 minutes ago
echoangle | 29 minutes ago
vulture916 | an hour ago
davedx | an hour ago
einrealist | 53 minutes ago
tzs | 25 minutes ago
ncruces | 24 minutes ago
TZubiri | 5 minutes ago
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.
peterbell_nyc | 2 hours ago
Is it something else?
heyflyguy | 2 hours ago
aschla | 2 hours ago
bink | an hour ago
Terr_ | an hour ago
(i.e. Unloading to tarmac, buses)
superturkey650 | an hour ago
aschla | an hour ago
bombcar | 58 minutes ago
stockresearcher | 59 minutes ago
Aboutplants | 2 hours ago
loloquwowndueo | 2 hours ago
wffurr | an hour ago
pwillia7 | an hour ago
goda90 | an hour ago
ex-aws-dude | 2 hours ago
https://www.flightaware.com/miserymap/
qurosh | 2 hours ago
KyleSanderson | 2 hours ago
bombcar | 53 minutes ago
tedd4u | 2 hours ago
gdulli | an hour ago
cscheid | an hour ago
sigmarule | an hour ago
dboreham | an hour ago
failingforward | an hour ago
fantasizr | an hour ago
freshtake | 2 hours ago
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"
precision1k | an hour ago
cout | 2 hours ago
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
12_throw_away | an hour ago
cobychapple | an hour ago
mirekrusin | 2 hours ago
squirrel | 2 hours ago
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-faa-says-it-will-phase-o...
asmithmd1 | 2 hours ago
Flight EY8 from Boston to Abu Dhabi https://fr24.com/ETD6PX/429055e2
g_t_r | an hour ago
There’s still lower ground telecoms for take off.
amluto | 2 hours ago
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? :)
Waterluvian | 2 hours ago
jtwaleson | an hour ago
Jtsummers | an hour ago
tzs | 28 minutes ago
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.
Jtsummers | 20 minutes ago
somat | 19 minutes ago
freediddy | an hour ago
To really fuck up, you need a computer.
EvanAnderson | an hour ago
NateEag | an hour ago
-- some clever person whose name I do not know
randysalami | an hour ago
"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!
emschwartz | an hour ago
AndrewKemendo | 2 hours ago
sccxy | 2 hours ago
NSUserDefaults | an hour ago
silverFork | 2 hours ago
prdonahue | 2 hours ago
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.
prdonahue | an hour ago
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.)
nickandbro | 2 hours ago
https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/modern-skies-trumps-transportat...
eli | an hour ago
llama052 | an hour ago
cobychapple | 2 hours ago
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...
ryanschaefer | 2 hours ago
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?
swader999 | an hour ago
alas44 | an hour ago
sigmarule | an hour ago
Hamuko | an hour ago
grumpymuppet | an hour ago
akomtu | 48 minutes ago
tttthrowaway123 | 2 hours ago
https://www.fly.faa.gov/ois/oisedit/adv_oisedit_dis?number=1...
cobychapple | an hour ago
dsjoerg | an hour ago
maybe the last two numbers are a time range for which the thing is effective? and it's over now?
dsjoerg | an hour ago
sigmarule | an hour ago
crystaln | an hour ago
jtbaker | an hour ago
redanddead | 2 hours ago
seizethecheese | an hour ago
Insane. It looks like they are showing no advisory on first page view, then advisory? Can others confirm?
antonvs | an hour ago
vevoe | an hour ago
kyleee | an hour ago
jsrozner | an hour ago
sigmarule | an hour ago
tamimio | 2 hours ago
Pissenschaftlom | 2 hours ago
hatthew | an hour ago
warkdarrior | 51 minutes ago
xxn5ac | 2 hours ago
Claude: Transmogrifying…
Shall I stop all trains too?
Cogitated for 50s · done 14:53 PM
ggm | an hour ago
tgma | an hour ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=US-Wifhg2Mo
newspaper1 | an hour ago
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...
ericmay | an hour ago
newspaper1 | an hour ago
ericmay | 30 minutes ago
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.
OhMeadhbh | an hour ago
ChrisMarshallNY | an hour ago
https://www.weather.gov/afc/radaroutage
alexforster | an hour ago
ChrisMarshallNY | an hour ago
It is a frontpage post. That's where I saw it.
Eji1700 | an hour ago
micah94 | an hour ago
0x4e | an hour ago
nemo44x | an hour ago
frenchmajesty | an hour ago
steveBK123 | an hour ago
dofm | an hour ago
Havoc | an hour ago
...so at least it's not something 911-ish
sota_pop | an hour ago
https://www.news9.com/oklahoma-city-news/national-weather-se...
nonfamous | an hour ago
Given that the FAA issue also apparently relates to communications, it does seem like it might be related.
ericbarrett | an hour ago
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.
arrowleaf | 50 minutes ago
mikewarot | an hour ago
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
EvanAnderson | an hour ago
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.
kogasa240p | an hour ago
aschla | an hour ago
rogerrogerr | an hour ago
aschla | an hour ago
lisper | an hour ago
erickhill | an hour ago
_heimdall | an hour ago
sokoloff | an hour ago
EvanAnderson | an hour ago
hoherd | an hour ago
cebert | 47 minutes ago
kccqzy | 17 minutes ago
cookingmyserver | 56 minutes ago
NoFingerprints | 41 minutes ago
crystaln | an hour ago
nxobject | an hour ago
> “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...
GolfPopper | an hour ago
wickedsight | an hour ago
rurp | an hour ago
davidw | 22 minutes ago
sigmarule | 38 minutes ago
_heimdall | 10 minutes ago
bernardv | an hour ago
Epimethus | an hour ago
ughitsaaron | an hour ago
- [0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-forgotten-operating-syst...
Animats | an hour ago
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.
Maxion | an hour ago
awefkjawelfkja0 | an hour ago
AnneTrotter | 33 minutes ago
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.
tempestn | 22 minutes ago
kraken_cult | 10 minutes ago
freediddy | an hour ago
fizx | 49 minutes ago
neves | 55 minutes ago
Probably someone prompted an agent: solve global CO2 emissions :-)
ignoramous | 16 minutes ago
5 days from now? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50465829
moondev | 51 minutes ago
Jagerbizzle | 46 minutes ago
the_mar | 46 minutes ago
flights departing hawaii and alaska are also allowed
jjulius | 37 minutes ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50491511
the_mar | 28 minutes ago
dang | 25 minutes ago
the_mar | 19 minutes ago
moondev | 45 minutes ago
ctrlkctrls | 40 minutes ago
peterleiser | 29 minutes ago
lxgr | 16 minutes ago
reaperducer | 50 minutes ago
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.
United857 | 11 minutes ago
hector_vasquez | an hour ago
u1hcw9nx | an hour ago
mzs | an hour ago
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.
veeragoni | an hour ago
ck2 | an hour ago
> "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...
scottbez1 | an hour ago
jerlam | an hour ago
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.
dboreham | an hour ago
Kevin_Flynn | an hour ago
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. :|
233mhz | an hour ago
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
llama052 | an hour ago
OhMeadhbh | an hour ago
sixhobbits | an hour ago
> 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...
rsoto2 | an hour ago
“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.
edoceo | an hour ago
rurp | an hour ago
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.
llama052 | an hour ago
What could go wrong really...
NewsaHackO | 46 minutes ago
macintux | 43 minutes ago
bitcurious | 12 minutes ago
NewsaHackO | 5 minutes ago
lxgr | an hour ago
> The FAA has reassured the public and airlines that SMART only suggests routes and doesn't affect air safety.
johnbellone | 57 minutes ago
LPisGood | 54 minutes ago
erickhill | 48 minutes ago
zamadatix | 44 minutes ago
ultrarunner | 46 minutes ago
johnbellone | 35 minutes ago
winternett | 45 minutes ago
The destructive & arrogant behaviors won't be reigned in properly if we all fail to recognize that, just FTR.
xgulfie | 57 minutes ago
boringg | 49 minutes ago
water-data-dude | 38 minutes ago
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.
testtestmetest | an hour ago
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.
cogman10 | an hour ago
edoceo | an hour ago
llama052 | an hour ago
yeah... sounds about right.
rurp | an hour ago
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.
TacticalCoder | an hour ago
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...
throwaway27448 | an hour ago
mhb | 48 minutes ago
devin | 47 minutes ago
bjourne | 46 minutes ago
NoFingerprints | 56 minutes ago
"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.
erickhill | 50 minutes ago
marricks | 45 minutes ago
_heimdall | 27 minutes ago
Is this more common than I realize in US executive deparyments and agencies?
njovin | 22 minutes ago
xp84 | 12 minutes ago
Is the fascism in the room with us?
consumer451 | 11 minutes ago
NoFingerprints | 19 minutes ago
xp84 | 13 minutes ago
bmitc | 14 minutes ago
mv4 | 10 minutes ago
bongoman42 | 42 minutes ago
digitaltrees | 28 minutes ago
s__s | 40 minutes ago
rooftopzen | 25 minutes ago
xp84 | 10 minutes ago
shagie | 34 minutes ago
cobychapple | 9 minutes ago
bijowo1676 | an hour ago
bijowo1676 | an hour ago
thoughtpeddler | an hour ago
bijowo1676 | 48 minutes ago
robeym | an hour ago
m_kos | an hour ago
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vThhccsTanAz...
AI is updating it hourly. Since it is AI, always verify yourself.
jareklupinski | an hour ago
run jensen run
danielsoto317 | an hour ago
erickhill | an hour ago
liotier | an hour ago
0xbadcafebee | an hour ago
Centigonal | an hour ago
ssttoo | an hour ago
ssttoo | an hour ago
Also he says he saw a plane taking off LAX so fingers crossed. Still no news though
ssttoo | 43 minutes ago
bigredthrowaway | an hour ago
panick21_ | an hour ago
apublicfrog | an hour ago
tttthrowaway123 | an hour ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/germany/comments/1udup2j/trains_hal...
hcal | an hour ago
bdangubic | an hour ago
pkulak | an hour ago
panick21_ | 26 minutes ago
ronburgandy28 | an hour ago
thatguysaguy | an hour ago
MSKJ | an hour ago
rooftopzen | an hour ago
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...
cyanydeez | an hour ago
throwaway27448 | an hour ago
quantum_state | an hour ago
contact9879 | an hour ago
https://flighty.com/airports
tiffanyh | an hour ago
“FAA says it will phase out floppy disks from air traffic control”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50388001
precision1k | an hour ago
AngryData | an hour ago
Waterluvian | an hour ago
AngryData | 43 minutes ago
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.
lxgr | an hour ago
lxgr | 33 minutes ago
erickhill | an hour ago
VCFundedGenYer | an hour ago
infamouscow | an hour ago
cobychapple | an hour ago
ebilgenius | 40 minutes ago
> 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...
rooftopzen | 17 minutes ago
https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-national-weather-servi...
AnimalMuppet | an hour ago
Update: https://www.foxnews.com/live-news/faa-issues-nationwide-grou...
destitude | 20 minutes ago
carimura | an hour ago
bmiekre | an hour ago
no-dr-onboard | an hour ago
Sure smells like something foreboding
polarsanel | an hour ago
jiscariot | an hour ago
VladVladikoff | 59 minutes ago
polarsanel | 50 minutes ago
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.
12_throw_away | 33 minutes ago
firsthummus | 31 minutes ago
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.
cynicalpeace | 53 minutes ago
djeastm | 51 minutes ago
But I'm completely just spitballing here.
speransky | 51 minutes ago
gogosliwa | 50 minutes ago
ghurtado | 49 minutes ago
> Airlines said flights in the air would continue.
This is a huge relief! phew
MBCook | 48 minutes ago
khimaros | 48 minutes ago
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/11/faa-expands-ai-advice-to-...
https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/SMART_One-Pager.pdf
SubiculumCode | 44 minutes ago
zmmmmm | 44 minutes ago
A sequence of events:
Can anybody join these dots?komali2 | 9 minutes ago
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.
ctrlkctrls | 42 minutes ago
saladdays | 41 minutes ago
penneyd | 20 minutes ago
inheritedwisdom | 35 minutes ago
paulmist | 20 minutes ago
windexh8er | 20 minutes ago
swingboy | 34 minutes ago
paimapi | 33 minutes ago
gib444 | 32 minutes ago
LastTrain | 28 minutes ago
exegete | 26 minutes ago
coolfox | 25 minutes ago
https://status.flyio.net/incidents/01M76HANB3XQC6WYKPA69WQN8...
mmoustafa | 18 minutes ago
phb01 | 21 minutes ago
amanaplanacanal | 10 minutes ago
phb01 | 7 minutes ago
amanaplanacanal | 12 minutes ago
fooey | 8 minutes ago
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.