All flights in the United States are grounded until further notice “due to extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety,” the Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement.
The FAA issued the ground stop “following a communication issue impacting all Air Route Traffic Control Centers,” Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said in a social media post. “FAA technicians are investigating the issue.”
Air Route Traffic Control Centers are regional facilities that handle flights going across the country.
“Traffic should remain ground stopped until further notice,” the FAA said in an advisory. “International flights will be managed on a case by case basis.”
From yesterday:
WHAT
Hey Claude, is runway 5 free?
OMG, people are going to die because of this.
No fucking way 😆 staying home for the holidays then
Flight crews over the US flying on instruments
Surely you cant be serious
I am serious. And stop calling me Shirley.
How did Flavor Flave seem to know before everybody else?
He requested it, and FAA had no choice but to shut things down
In addition to his other duties, Flavor Flav is also official timekeeper for the FAA. He keeps all the clocks synced in the nation’s air traffic control towers. He just had a sick day today.
What else do you think the clock was for?
At work we use rubidium-87 clocks synced against GPS for highly accurate time keeping. GPS satellites sync their time against Flav.
He is the time master and thus in charge of scheduling, is he not? That’s why he has that giant clock around his neck.
Yes. MC Hammer only got his catchphrase via Flav’s blessing
He saw the FAA announce the rollout of a new system to replace the old reliable one that was created by people who knew wtf they were doing.
The FAA tweet that said “goodbye to paper” basically gave everyone who ever worked in government IT a massive heads-up
Check his Kalshi bets.
Because he’s in the Pacific Time Zone?
Is ATC in the US MS Teams based?
They ran out of AI tokens.
Or even worse: Outlook based!
Exchange XP
Microsoft Access, actually
deleted by creator
Did the FAA ask its new AI to “safely bring back online the Air Route Traffic Control Centers without breaking anything else. Make no mistakes!” ?
Yes, but they did not ask nicely.
INSUFFICIENT POLITENESS AND PRAISE DETECTED. SKYNET MODE ENGAGED. ALL YOUR TOWERS ARE BELONG TO US
Please drink verification can to continue
They forgot to ask for breast size
They just upgraded from floppy drives. My money is on them letting a virus into the system, or that the new system had major security problems.
https://www.techspot.com/news/114471-almost-2027-faa-finally-replacing-floppy-disks-used.html
“The FAA wants E-IDS installed at 435 facilities by the end of 2028. Five sites have already replaced their floppy disk-based systems: Atlantic City International Airport, Nashville International Airport, Greater Rochester International Airport, and data processing hubs in Atlanta and Salt Lake City”
Edit: it looks like they also just started expanding and AI traffic management system nationwide.
https://avweb.com/aviation-news/faa-expands-ai-assisted-traffic-management/
You joke, but I believe the first cutover was today. Please correct me if my memory failed me.
Some piece of data for Delta didn’t go through Atlanta and the whole thing panicked.
The upgrade won’t be complete until the end of 2028
Five sites have already replaced their floppy disk-based systems: Atlantic City International Airport, Nashville International Airport, Greater Rochester International Airport, and data processing hubs in Atlanta and Salt Lake City
But no real knowledge of when what will be done, they also announced a rollout of an AI system. Plus there was a blip with weather radar earlier. It could be anything really, or everything
As long as we’re wildly speculating I’d like to posit: aliens are attacking the earth
I would have stayed with floppies. Less to go wrong.
They wear out and IDK if it’s feasible to get replacements manufactured.
I dunno, it’s probally easier to make/obtain floppies than RAM right now.
It’s not. I don’t think there has been any new manufacture of floppies in years. RAM is available, just really expensive.
Is the FAA using Starshield for their communication?
Plus, weren’t a lot of them fired during the doge shit?
I believe most quit due to not wanting to do the stressful job without pay during financial shutdowns, but either way yeah there’s way fewer
And quit/retired.
But wasn’t that even forced? They bought them out, I think. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I remember them telling them to retire.
They were all nearing retirement age at the same time because Ronald Regan fired all their predecessors when they went on strike back in the 80’s. Having a critical highly trained workforce with hard retirement limits (they’re not allowed to work till they’re 85 like Senators) all on the career cadence has been a ticking time bomb.
My sincere fear with this is that it means Trump is about to launch a colossal attack on Iran that he knows will result in retaliation that will, in fact, harm Americans domestically and significantly so.
I’m so tired of this demented pedophile sack of shit and the limp dick Dems who refuse to resist him.
I feel like we’re in the calm before the storm
Uh, holy shit.
I’m pretty sure the last time this happened was 9/11, right?
There was one other incident in 2023.
There was a 90 minute ground halt in 2023 because of a fuck up. They also closed down the airspace around El Paso in 2025 because of a fuckup involving idiot admin officials playing with a military laser. So I’m gonna guess this is either something really fucking scary or really fucking stupid.
2023, but otherwise yes
I wonder what type of extraterrestrial invader the conspiracy people will blame it on.
I wonder if this is going to be the thing that gets congresspeople to wake the fuck up and start taking the corruption and incompetence seriously, now that it’s personally inconveniencing them?
I wonder if this is about Microsoft outages lol
Shouldn’t that have happened yesterday when the Microsoft outage started?
Nominally yeah but cascading failures can be delayed or like the other guy replied to me it could be fall out of data breaches if the Microsoft outage was CVE related
The federal government does use outlook and teams. My bet is the “outage” was actually a cyber attack and some used it to get a lot of information.
While the air traffic control systems aren’t Microsoft powered all the related administrative bits are. So someone may have detailed information on how to access those systems
Edit: Being reported as a communications outage
Microsoft has specifically stated it wasn’t a breach so they’d be especially fucked in that case.
I mean I don’t trust them not to lie their ass off. Corporations aren’t particularly trustworthy
You can usually trust their statements, not because they said so, but because they get sued into oblivion and what they say/do is extremely critical to those lawsuits.
they get sued into oblivion
Microsoft spends a metric fuckton on legal to protect against this kind of risk.
Nobody is bankrupting them through the courts.
Its not about bankrupting, it’s about getting the high ranking bean counters scared. And that’s not hard, in fact it’s beyond easy.
When publically traded companies issue offical statements that are outright falsehoods that materially impact share price, shit can actually hit the fan. A lot of uberwealthy people own a lot of MS stock and fucking with rich people’s money is one of the few ways a rich person can actually catch jail time in the US.
My bet is the “outage” was actually a cyber attack
Never attribute to maliciousness what can be more easily attributed to incompetence.
“We need more defense spending” is where the reflective assumption that we’re under attack inevitably leads. And after throwing hundreds of billions at the NSA, if you believe we’re still easily suseptible to a national grid failure, what will another billion towards state security achieve?
I don’t think we need more money thrown at defense or that the NSA was effective at anything.
Attacks can still happen though
My pet theory is that non-US AI has caught up to mythos and can basically hack enterprise and government systems. Things that were unhackable because of complexity and/or being written in obscure coding languages are now easy targets for an agentic swarm. The last time we shut down all air travel was 911 btw. Just sayin’
It was actually in 2023 due to a glitch keeping pilots from being able to upload flight plans, but it was short.
so does ground stop mean: if you’re in air, continue. if not yet in air, sit and wait?
Unless it’s international, apparently that’s case by case
WHY haven’t Americans said THANK YOU yet For This?
-JD Vance!
