There you have it! The FAA just grounded every departing flight in the country.
November 14, 2026 · 0 likes · 0 comments
China Threat AI Defense Cybersecurity
There you have it! The FAA just grounded every departing flight in the country.
Full story, just the facts: https://lnkd.in/edAaPY9d
Since about 3:54 PM ET today, FlightAware has tallied more than 4,400 U.S.-related cancellations and over 10,000 delays. Cirium counts at least 600 diversions. The order runs through at least 11 PM ET and the chaos has spilled into Canada.
What broke? Multiple sources told CBS News that an update to the private network linking air traffic control caused a reboot, then a crash. The FAA has not confirmed a cause. Officials say there is no indication of a cyberattack, while also saying they are "not ruling out anything at this point."
President Trump said it plainly: "a bunch of old broken stuff." He is right. And the day before this happened, the administration asked Congress for $30.1 billion to build "a resilient telecommunications backbone" for air traffic control. The weakness was already on the record.
I am not saying this was an attack but... it could be.
But here is what keeps me up at night. I am not sure what is more worrisome: the outage itself, or the fact that I don't think they would even have the capability to know if we were being attacked. We could look at it and call it a regular outage.
Why? Because we don't have proper AI agents monitoring these networks, let alone defending them.
I spent years inside DHS and the Pentagon fighting this exact fight. Legacy systems. Patchwork networks. Nobody with real-time visibility. Manual processes where machines should be doing the watching 24/7.
China and Iran are not waiting. Their teams are already using AI to probe our critical infrastructure at machine speed. And we are still running the nation's airspace on decades-old gear with humans staring at screens.
An update takes down the entire system and grounds the country. Think about what a capable adversary could do on purpose, and how long it would take us to even notice.
This is not about blaming the technicians working tonight to get people home. They are doing their job. This is about leadership that has let critical infrastructure rot for decades without the tools to see what is happening inside it.
Modernization cannot just mean new towers and new hardware. It must mean AI that watches every packet, flags anomalies in seconds, and responds before humans even know there is a problem.
Otherwise, next time, we may not even know who flipped the switch.
Time to wake up!
Full story, just the facts: https://lnkd.in/edAaPY9d
Since about 3:54 PM ET today, FlightAware has tallied more than 4,400 U.S.-related cancellations and over 10,000 delays. Cirium counts at least 600 diversions. The order runs through at least 11 PM ET and the chaos has spilled into Canada.
What broke? Multiple sources told CBS News that an update to the private network linking air traffic control caused a reboot, then a crash. The FAA has not confirmed a cause. Officials say there is no indication of a cyberattack, while also saying they are "not ruling out anything at this point."
President Trump said it plainly: "a bunch of old broken stuff." He is right. And the day before this happened, the administration asked Congress for $30.1 billion to build "a resilient telecommunications backbone" for air traffic control. The weakness was already on the record.
I am not saying this was an attack but... it could be.
But here is what keeps me up at night. I am not sure what is more worrisome: the outage itself, or the fact that I don't think they would even have the capability to know if we were being attacked. We could look at it and call it a regular outage.
Why? Because we don't have proper AI agents monitoring these networks, let alone defending them.
I spent years inside DHS and the Pentagon fighting this exact fight. Legacy systems. Patchwork networks. Nobody with real-time visibility. Manual processes where machines should be doing the watching 24/7.
China and Iran are not waiting. Their teams are already using AI to probe our critical infrastructure at machine speed. And we are still running the nation's airspace on decades-old gear with humans staring at screens.
An update takes down the entire system and grounds the country. Think about what a capable adversary could do on purpose, and how long it would take us to even notice.
This is not about blaming the technicians working tonight to get people home. They are doing their job. This is about leadership that has let critical infrastructure rot for decades without the tools to see what is happening inside it.
Modernization cannot just mean new towers and new hardware. It must mean AI that watches every packet, flags anomalies in seconds, and responds before humans even know there is a problem.
Otherwise, next time, we may not even know who flipped the switch.
Time to wake up!