As of thirty-ish minutes ago ALL commercial air traffic in the US is grounded until further notice.

Anyone got any idea what’s going on? There are very free details about the situation I can find online right now.

  • Optional@lemmy.world
    8·
    18 hours ago

    The outages across the country involve air traffic control radars as well as radio frequencies simultaneously going out, according to an aviation source familiar with what controllers are dealing with.

    Controllers do not have any clarity on the cause and what exactly is going on, the source said.

    Last year, controllers handling flights approaching or departing from Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey had multiple radar and communication outages when problems with a copper cable carrying the information led to communication blackouts.

    As a result, multiple controllers took trauma leave, which exacerbated already short staffing and led to long delays and cancellations. The cable that failed was eventually replaced with a fiberoptic cable, according to the Department of Transportation.

    https://www.cnn.com/2026/11/13/us/live-news/flights-ground-stop-faa

    • jaybone@lemmy.zipEnglish
      9·
      17 hours ago

      How do radio frequencies “go out”? I guess they mean no one is broadcasting, but I don’t think of a frequency as going out.

      • Optional@lemmy.world
        7·
        17 hours ago

        Yeah, I wondered that too. It’s really hard to fuck up communication this bad.

        Controllers do not have any clarity on the cause and what exactly is going on, the source said.

        That made a lot of sense tho.

    • robert@piefed.caOPEnglish
      1·
      15 hours ago

      A lot of people here are blaming the new AI system, and that sounded like the most plausible explanation to me, but after reading this I’m not so sure. I’m not sure how an LLM could mess up the communications that bad.