The Ground Stop Was Not a Bomb. It Was a Radio Circuit.

On the afternoon of 13 November, the Federal Aviation Administration issued a ground stop on every departure from every airport in the United States. The cause was not weather, not a strike, not a bomb. It was a communications failure affecting all air traffic control centres on the flight routes. Flights had already stopped at Chicago's airports before the national order followed.

"FAA technicians are investigating," Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy wrote on X. The agency gave no time for lifting the order. By evening, officials said the disruption was easing in some regions — which tells you what kind of problem this was: a system degrading and recovering, not a building on fire.

The honest answer at hour one

The Department of Homeland Security was unusually direct. Secretary Markwayne Mullin said there was no evidence of an attack and told reporters this was "not another 9/11" — then added that nothing had been ruled out. That second sentence is the shape of modern infrastructure risk: at hour one you do not know, and the safe assumption is that it does not matter.

The last time this happened was January 2023, when the NOTAM system — the notices that carry hazards to pilots — went down. That outage lasted under two hours and was still the first nationwide halt since 2001. This one was projected at eight hours minimum, with airline staff at Las Vegas warning it could run to twenty-four.

Wind, they said

At Las Vegas, Southwest counters told passengers there might be no departures at all that night. Departure boards kept advertising flights as on time. Some passengers were told the delay was high wind. Joseph Anderson, 72, bound for Oakland, said he had heard nobody was allowed to fly, "but they still haven't told the public" — and with luggage out of reach and highways likely jammed, he was effectively stuck.

What the ground stop actually cost

Nothing malicious had to happen for the largest aviation market on earth to stop. A telecommunications fault was enough, because the system that moves about three million people a day is a software and radio system with aeroplanes attached to it.

We depend more and more on technology, we can't avoid it, but we can make it safe. ABN Asia offers that.

Making it safe here is unglamorous work: redundant voice paths instead of one, monitoring that pages a named human when a circuit degrades, failover rehearsed often enough that the first real event is not the rehearsal, and a public status channel so passengers are never told it is windy when the country has stopped. You not only get software — you get secure software. If your operations would make the news when a link goes down, talk to us: [email protected].

Source: VnExpress, 14 November 2026, citing AFP and Reuters.