On Friday, November 13, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) grounded all domestic flights for more than four hours due to a massive telecommunications equipment overload. The incident resulted in the cancellation of more than 5,000 flights, making it the longest suspension of U.S. air travel since the September 11, 2001, attacks.
On Friday, November 13, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) grounded all domestic flights for more than four hours due to a massive telecommunications equipment overload. The incident resulted in the cancellation of more than 5,000 flights, making it the longest suspension of U.S. air travel since the September 11, 2001, attacks.
According to Western media, the ban on takeoff was in effect from 3:54 p.m. to 8:15 p.m. Eastern Time. At the time of the emergency declaration, more than 3,500 aircraft were in the sky (4,042 flights, according to Flightradar24). As a result, 300,000 to 400,000 passengers were stranded at airports across the country, and terminals in Washington and Chicago reached their capacity limits.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy explained that the cause of the collapse was an outdated air traffic control system whose switches and routers could not handle the flow of data. This caused instability in the operation of radars and communications at the 21st Air Traffic Control Center and Terminal Radar Centers (TRACON).
“ We have old switches, old routers. We’re using little copper lines from the 1980s. It’s an old system that’s failing — and it’s happening everywhere. It’s overloaded,” Duffy said during a White House briefing. He couldn’t explain to reporters what exactly caused the peak in traffic on a typical travel day.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin ruled out external interference, saying authorities see no evidence of a cyberattack or an attack using artificial intelligence.
Separately, speculation began to spread on social media that the collapse could be caused by tech giant Microsoft (which experienced its own global mail service outage earlier this week) or the startup Air Space Intelligence (ASI), whose valuation reached $3 billion in October 2026 after attracting $325 million in investment from Spark Capital, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and other funds.
The FAA previously selected ASI to deliver a 12-year, $875 million contract to modernize the nation’s air traffic control system, developing AI software for SMART (Strategic Airspace and Trajectory Management) and FMDS (Flow Management Data and Services). The solutions are based on the company’s proprietary Flyways AI platform, which the startup previously invested nearly $100 million in. It combines operational data and predictive modeling to predict delays before they occur.
SMART’s initial rollout began this fall, and full deployment of both systems is expected to take 12 to 24 months. In addition, ASI’s technology is already being used by commercial carriers (Delta, United, Alaska Airlines), energy grids, and the Pentagon (including the U.S. Air Force, Indo-Pacific Command, and the Army, which recently awarded the startup a $99 million contract).
Both companies quickly denied any involvement in the outage. Microsoft said on social media that they had no indication of a connection between the incident and their services. Air Space Intelligence also stressed that neither the SMART system nor any other product of the company was the cause of the flight suspension. Sean Duffy and Markwayne Mullin confirmed this information, specifying that the SMART system is completely isolated from the outdated equipment that failed.
In the wake of the incident, the Secretary of Transportation called on Congress to allocate $50 billion for major repairs to aviation infrastructure, emphasizing that analog components will continue to break down.
At the same time, aviation security expert David Soucy, in a commentary for CNN, noted that simply replacing the hardware will not solve the problem, because the main difficulty lies in the coordination and interdependence of systems. According to him, copper lines have been used for decades for a reason, since a full transition to digital opens up new vectors for cyberattacks.
" They can’t be changed, they can’t be modified, they can’t be hacked… so changing that and at the same time maintaining a stable system that won’t be vulnerable to attacks is not an easy task. Even if it were a completely digital system where everything was new, there would still be new vulnerabilities that didn’t exist before, with copper wires," Susi explained.
The modernization of the US aviation network is already underway. After a 90-second radar outage at Newark Liberty Airport in May 2025, Congress approved a $12.5 billion five-year upgrade program. According to the Associated Press, the FAA has already replaced thousands of copper cables with fiber optics and upgraded hundreds of radio systems.
Just earlier this month, on November 6, 2026, the agency announced plans to completely phase out 1.44MB floppy disks at more than 400 sites, where they have been used for decades to store weather data and other critical information, by the end of 2028. However, in September 2026, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) warned in a report that critical obsolescence of the remaining legacy networks (some of which date back to the 1960s) and the uncoordinated introduction of new technologies on top of them create high risks of new failures.
