Air traffic control, phone systems and emails are all down following China’s AI espionage scandal — is there a common answer?
Similarly, this is the first time in global aviation history where there has been a nationwide ground stop with no satisfactory, clear explanation and immediate fix.
Key points
- The timing is almost too coincidental to be a coincidence – coming on the heels of the removal of Jensen Huang as Nvidia CEO amidst an affair with a suspected Chinese spy, widespread recriminations about chip exports to China, and demands for tighter export controls and more hawkish policies against China.
- Two blackouts, measured in billions in lost economic activity and inconvenience The last nationwide ground stop, in 2023, lasted about 90 minutes and still delayed more than 10,000 flights and canceled 1,300.
- At the four-hour point of this latest ground stop, 10,243 flights were already delayed and 3,234 cancelled, with flights grounded not only at single regional airports but across the entire nation, suggesting systemic breakdowns rather than localized issues.
Both blackouts struck within a day-and-a-half of the most damaging China espionage story in years.
ET on Friday, November 13, the Federal Aviation Administration grounded every departing flight in America, “due to extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety.” It was only the third nationwide ground stop ever ordered.
Additional details
- House of Representatives was substantively incapacitated; a federal appeals court that could not send or receive email; Britain’s Parliament and its National Health Service, where the failure threatened patients’ prescriptions; Australia’s spy agency and federal police were sent offline as well.
- Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy would say only that “a communication issue” had struck every one of the 22 centers that guide planes across the country, and that technicians were investigating.
- For a full day it insisted there was “no indication” of malicious activity while its own bulletins showed it did not know what had broken.
- If it did not know for sure, then how could they know for sure there was no indication of anything malicious amidst shifting explanations?
- An old English proverb anchored in superstition from ancient Greek and Roman beliefs is that bad luck always comes in threes, but that does not mean bad luck was always random.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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