America's Skies Went Silent for Four Hours, and the Government Blames Old Phone Lines

If you were trying to fly anywhere in the U.S. on Friday afternoon, you probably already know this story. At 3:54 p.m. Eastern, the FAA stopped every departing flight in the country. It's only the second time that's happened since 9/11; the other was the January 2023 outage, when a key FAA computer system failed, and pilots couldn't get their pre-flight paperwork.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said trouble with radar and communications began shortly after 3:30 p.m., with about 3,500 planes already in the air. The ground stop wasn't lifted until 8:15 p.m. By then, Al Jazeera reported, citing FlightAware, around 7,000 flights had been delayed or cancelled.

So what broke? At a White House briefing Friday night, Duffy pointed to ageing equipment. He described an air traffic control system that still runs on analogue telecom and said its switches and routers simply got overloaded with data. He called it an emergency, warned that "you will have more of these", and pushed Congress for money for a full overhaul. The FAA and the White House asked lawmakers for another $30.1 billion on Friday, on top of the $12.5 billion approved last year.

Was it a cyberattack? Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said it doesn't appear that way, while admitting nothing is completely certain yet. There's also an AI angle people are chewing on. The FAA rolled out an AI traffic tool called SMART nationwide just days earlier. Its maker, AirSpace Intelligence, and Duffy both insist it had nothing to do with the outage, though Mullin said officials are looking at it.

Democrats, including Hakeem Jeffries and Tammy Duckworth, are demanding answers, and Duffy says he expects things to be back to normal before Thanksgiving travel.