35 comments

  • andrewgioia 5 hours ago

    Does anyone have any insight on this? Currently at LGA and they’re continuing boarding procedures, but they’re not giving us any updates otherwise.

    • abnry 5 hours ago
      • 1970-01-01 4 hours ago

        A national radar outage would do it. This would be a bigger story. Everyone needs it to forecast. However it doesn't seem to actually be offline. So I don't think it was a very long outage if it did go down.

        • ddtaylor 4 hours ago

          How do a bunch of separate radars all go down at the same time? Aren't they spread around the US?

          • 1970-01-01 4 hours ago

            I'm thinking it was "the website went down" issue.

        • gscott 4 hours ago

          The floppy disk upgrade went wrong

        • Aperocky 4 hours ago

          weather radar still works for weather channels..

      • O5vYtytb 4 hours ago

        I can still access NOAA radars just fine.

    • micah94 4 hours ago

      Homeland Security saying "telecommunications" outage. But nothing more at this point...

      • tosapple 3 hours ago

        microsoft yesterday, funny.

        • latentsea 3 hours ago

          Jensen the day before that, funny.

    • jmclnx 5 hours ago

      I think I remember seeing an article here about air traffic controller systems moving off of 3.5" diskettes. Related ?

      • neko_ranger 5 hours ago

        "upgrade to cds. make no mistakes"

      • gosub100 5 hours ago

        No, my guess is cyber attack from a state we've been making false accusations against.

        • junga 4 hours ago

          Which one?

          • majorchord 3 hours ago

            Too many enemies to guess at this point

        • ashdksnndck 4 hours ago

          Can you fill in the blanks here? My attempt: "China would never spy on us, but because of the implication they would put 50k of our citizens currently in the air in mortal danger"?

          • thephyber 2 hours ago

            It's not a credible thesis, at least not given the info we have. Tier 1 cyber enemies would have done something more subtle (so as not to trigger a kinetic warfare response or a response in kind) or something so obvious that they announce it with a declaration of war.

            It's far more likely that the creaky old civilian radar infra has problems or some old single point of failure (maybe an old mainframe) has/had downtime. There are 3 widely rumored causes of this FAA outage (with seemingly no evidence) related to projects that the Feds were already working on making: (1) an AI air traffic controller assistant, (2) migration to something newer than 1970s floppy disk tech, (3) migration away from radar to GPS for controllers).

            All of these are more likely than a foreign cyber team attacking FAA systems in this way.

        • GolfPopper 3 hours ago

          So, "We have met the enemy and he is us?"

  • United857 5 hours ago

    Is this the first such case since 9/11?

    • dole 5 hours ago

      No.

      "January 11, 2023. All U.S. departing flights were halted for several hours after a computer outage crashed the FAA's Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) pilot notification system"

      9/11, 2023 and today are the only three times.

      • luxuryballs an hour ago

        July 19th 2024 crowdstrike/microsoft update issue halted a bunch of (all?) flights in the US also (coincidentally 6 days after presidential assassination attempt)

        • echoangle 37 minutes ago

          Not due to a requirement by the FAA but by the airlines being dependent on their windows computers, right? Legally, you were still allowed to fly, I think.

    • Jtsummers 5 hours ago

      9/11 was different, that also required all planes to land, more or less, as quickly as possible and not continue to their destinations (unless that was timely, I suppose). This one is a departure ground stop, no more planes going up. Planes in the air haven't been ordered to land yet.

    • KPGv2 5 hours ago

      no, there was one in 2023 when a pilot notification system went down

  • promptsupporter 5 hours ago

    Something with frequency of ATC signals?

  • ChrisArchitect 5 hours ago

    Some more discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50489641

  • jmclnx 5 hours ago
  • RickJWagner 3 hours ago

    First, the Microsoft outage. Now this.

    Extraordinary.

    • thephyber 2 hours ago

      Not extraordinary, at least not given the little information we have now.

      Even the hyperscalers (AWS, Oracle Cloud, CloudFlare) are down about once every 5 years for as long as Microsoft Office was yesterday.

      The FAA has systems older than I am and they are known to have at least 3 major upgrade projects in the works.

  • smrtinsert 2 hours ago

    I'm not saying it was aliens, but it was the aliens.

  • anthk 2 hours ago

    Dear Unix users, "man 6 atc" won't solve it.

  • ranger_danger 3 hours ago

    Could this be related to what caused Outlook to go down?

  • dmitrygr 5 hours ago