Yesterday it was Microsoft’s email servers going down leaving millions of users (including myself), the inability to send and receive emails.  And just in the last hour, the FAA has ordered a nationwide ground stop for all aircraft in the United States.  What does this mean?

It means all planes in the air must land at their destinations immediately with no departing flights allowed.  This hasn’t happened since 9/11.  What is the cause?  Just today, the FAA was implementing a new air traffic control system designed to take some of the load off our legacy air traffic control into a homogeneous system.  The new system is called “START” for Strategic Management of Airspace Routes and Trajectories.

Interestingly, the system is the first to use artificial intelligence (AI).  During yesterday’s Microsoft outage, two major artificial intelligence companies, Anthropic and Open AI were impacted.  So could today’s software glitch be AI agents run amok?  The FAA says the outage is not due to a cyberattack or threat, but it is quite coincidental that this is happening just 24 hours after Microsoft’s email servers went down worldwide, and AI was mentioned.

Just one more reason to be prepared as I posted the other day.