As of thirty-ish minutes ago ALL commercial air traffic in the US is grounded until further notice.
Anyone got any idea what’s going on? There are very free details about the situation I can find online right now.
My hot take:
We all know Trump has dementia.
So he just walked out in the evening and boarded a plane, not knowing where to. The others didn’t see him leaving, so they didn’t know either.
When he messaged to his folks that he is going to take off in a minute, they grounded everything immediately, just to be sure.
Then it took them only 4 hours because they are the world’s smartest ones.
I just now read regional traffic control centers, which link all the others, got overloaded with data traffic because the FAA communication system is a patchwork mess - multiple generations of new tech integrated with old legacy systems and each other over a long span of time. That kind of setup can be nursed and prodded along for years by dedicated maintainers, but at some point the upside-down Slurpee cup that’s been holding up one end of the shelf crumples and everything falls on the floor.
It was fine until these dumbfucks pushed AI without testing it. Who are you trying to glaze?
No, hodgepodges of old, difficult to maintain systems are not fine.
Don’t conflate the saying “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” to be the same as “if it works, don’t fix it”. Plenty of things can continue working when broken. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t fix them. You shouldn’t fix them with LLM slop, but that’s a different issue
Olivia Rinaldi was claiming over on Twitter that the FAA did an update to their telecommunications equipment, which caused a reboot. However when the system rebooted it immediately crashed. So since their communications are borked they just grounded everything.
Is it true? No idea.
Informed speculation but I believe this is correct. Specifically new modern (maybe vibe coded) software that is probably really tough to integrate with the hodgepodge of ancient systems current propping up our control system.
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I would expect there to be primary and backup services of communication. Such a massive/critical update would most likely be tested on a smaller region with the capability to fall back to the backup servers.
But also hearing how outdated and antiquated a lot of the facilities are (I know they’re rushing to upgrade everything from floppy disks), I could bet that the backup transmission services might not even be operational for some facilities.
This ain’t star trek, we ain’t got money for a second backup
There’s no official word, but to add some context, the FAA deployed a new AI-powered computer system for air traffic control yesterday.
Again, no proof that that’s what’s going on. But it sure is interesting.
They’ve officially denied this as being related.
So it probably is.
I watched the press conference and they admitted that the AI (actually, it’s called SI) systems overloaded the old routers so that’s why we need $50B in emergency money from congress because Trump is a builder and he knows how to build and also previous administrations were also partly to blame
That’s the summary if you haven’t see the press conference
Screw the Carter admin for purposefully installing slow routers to sabotage future ai innitiatives.
FFS
I’m tired of being right.
Edit: who’s going to be the no-bid contract winner?
Four Seasons Aviation?
Honestly, with this administration, that’s practically a confirmation that it is AI.
With this administration it could be literally any number of dumb fucking reasons.
As someone who’s grounded, this was my theory as well. They’re blaming old routers and software, but who wants to guess it couldn’t keep up with the roll out?
An AI posted system… powered on Copilot?..
They didn’t deploy it yesterday. They expanded it yesterday. It has been in use for a couple months so far.
Well, they expanded it from a single test installation to nationwide on the 12th. Which meets my personal criteria for “deployment”.
I bet it thought it was directing real air traffic but in reality it was traffic from Microsoft Flight Simulator.
The current SMART roll out should have been nothing but route optimization, if human controllers agreed. OTOH, that’s one hell of a coincidence if that was related.
It’s the SMART rollout for sure. The failure point was old analog hardware that couldn’t keep up with the sheer pummeling the AI algorithm was dishing out to accomplish effectively nothing the controllers couldn’t do before.
We never had these kinds of outages before they got rid of DEI.
Bring back the twinks!
Unironically. And expand their budget for programming socks
Unrelated. But you’re right.
It is unrelated, but it was a reference to how after the Potomac River mid-air collision, Trump blamed it on DEI before anyone even knew what had happpened and Duffy echoed that claim saying the FAA had been ruined by DEI.
I will never forgive them for responding to a tragedy in that way.
At least this event is just a big disruption and afaik didn’t result in any accidents. Therefore I feel entitled to mock them.
I think that is the joke. That’s how I took it
IMO theyre keeping it under wraps for one of these reasons:
- it was an attack and they dont want panic
- it was yet another huge failure of “ai” bullshit and they can’t upset shareholders any longer so need to keep secret
- it was floppies
It could be something totally innocuous. Last time this happened it was because one engineer pushed an update that broke everything, iirc.
You mean the clownstrike?
Ha hahahhaha
Hahahhahahha
FAA ATC isn’t using computers that can even run Crowdstrike, so they were safe from that.
Also those aren’t the kind of systems where you would “push an update”, so the commenter I was replying to I assume was referring to that. Which did cause a ton of groundings. But not due to FAA/ATC systems, rather due to windows boxes operated by the carrier’s personnel.
Just to be clear: I wasn’t laughing at the poster, but at the ATC’s incredibly outdated (but until recently reliable) computers.
Do they still run shit written in assembly and allowed FORTRAN for faster and easier coding?
It’s because they’re using teams
As someone who is forced to use teams at work, if pilots used teams every single flight would crash, no exceptions.
Maybe the scariest possibility.
Maybe the tanker crash near Louisiana had more to it than a steering failure, and they figured if ships will collide might be worth figuring out more before planes go down.
More than likely neither are related and it’s smart to play it safe if air traffic controllers were having any issues
Or another day of distraction
I was on a flight when everything was grounded. I asked the pilot and he could neither confirm nor deny that it’s aliens.
My connecting flight was cancelled so I split a $600 Uber with four strangers
One of the folks looks a lot like John Candy.
Another is an old Polish lady who said “I had a feeling ze world would end today”
Polka polka polka
The chubby funny white guy named Dan literally made this joke. It was awesome.
Edit: Dan gave me a ride home from our destination airport even though it was out of his way. He’s a great dude. Definitely a John Candy.
So… its aliens.
He didn’t say it’s not, so…
I CAN’T HELP but think it’s low key another stunt to, yet again, drive up fuel and travel prices RIGHT before the holiday!
Think about it, all these people now need to rebook travel, creating demand for planes/seats/times, and as demands rises we KNOW ticket prices do too.
That’s, IMHO, why there’s no announcement as to why there are no flights right now.
Could be a false flag for an attack on Iran this weekend.
Airlines have to rebook these people for free, but it will still push prices up because the demand is the same but the supply got crunched.
Yeah agreed, I didn’t clarify very well!
My brother is an ATC. He didn’y have any more info yet, but I’ll update this comment when he knows more.
Edit: Just had dinner with him and he didn’t have any official info. He did say that
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He didn’t buy the official story of there being a communication issue between airports. It just doesn’t make sense based on how those communications networks function (sorry wish I had more detail here. he went into copper wire laid in the 1960s and how it’s different than just the public Internet.) But they wouldn’t ground crop dusters and planes flying VFR out of small airports if it were a communication issue.
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The AI rollout that has been in the news also very likely has nothing to do with it. Absolutely NO controllers have been breifed on any new systems, so it’s likely just something to grab a headline from the Trump administration.
It was his day off but his work called twice while we were at dinner trying to get him to come in.
probably to extort 50bn from congress, duffy is now asking if they want toa void another “grounding of the flights” just a few hours.
I patiently await the update
Just posted an edit. Sorry it’s not much.
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My theory: Trump Admin hired someone incompetent and they fucked up the comms. I mean that just the theme of trump admins basically
Big Balls II: Electric Groundaloo
That’s not completely fair. Sometimes they hire corrupt people too!
The actual advisory from the FAA is:
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 20:54Source: https://www.fly.faa.gov/ois/oisedit/adv_oisedit_dis?number=111&day=11132026&gdp=-1&gstop=196093
Beyond that, all I’ve seen so far is:
Markwayne Mullin, the secretary of homeland security, says Trump administration officials blamed a telecommunication outage but said they did not know its cause and that it would “take some time” to fix the issues grounding flights.
per NYT’s reporting: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/11/13/us/ground-stop-nationwide-flights-faa/d2ae2ce1-ac6b-59ad-ad8d-daef4e181b34
Edit (longer quote further down from Mullin):
Markwayne Mullin, the secretary of homeland security, blamed the ground stop on a telecommunication outage but said Trump administration officials did not know the cause, adding that it would take an extended period of time to fix the issues. “This isn’t going to just be resolved and turned around within the hour,” he said. “This is going to take some time.”
The extraordinary circumstances, probably:
Trump heard ‘the copilot’ was down and thought ‘but how are they going to land the planneesss? And grounded the country
This is quite literally possible.
You know… I wouldn’t rule this one out. Remember when he wanted to mobilize the military to bring interest rates down if they didn’t come down on their own?
Outlook and Teams outage /s
Honestly wouldn’t be surprised if air traffic control is run off of one massive excel document
A million different sheets all labelled “New Sheet 1” “New Sheet 1 (1)” and so on
That functions via a series of complex formulas and macros created by an ex-employee that no current employee understands.
And after following links to other sheets and files the last, most important one, lies in that persons personal SharePoint and is inaccessible
It’s like I’m at work right now
…and the whole thing is shared around via floppy disks
Well the news places just had a story a day or two ago about how they were rolling out AI air traffic control systems nationwide. Could be that their new AI shit the bed right away
The AI is prioritizing safety by not letting anyone fly.
Plane-to-plane collisions can be drastically reduced if we only allow one plane to fly at a time.
Scientists used AI to solve the sustainability challenges associated with passenger air transport.
That would also explain the private jet that fell out of the sky recently.
I mean, yes there were elevator issues reported on that plane and yes they were flying through a storm that caused historic flooding.
But maybe
My logic is undeniable
They might forget to
leave the irradiated arealand properly. Gotta remove the “through inaction” clause of the first law.
