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 1 days 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 1 days ago [-]
I'm thinking it was "the website went down" issue.
gscott 1 days ago [-]
The floppy disk upgrade went wrong
cromka 1 days ago [-]
Rotfl!
Aperocky 1 days ago [-]
weather radar still works for weather channels..
O5vYtytb 1 days ago [-]
I can still access NOAA radars just fine.
1 days ago [-]
micah94 1 days ago [-]
Homeland Security saying "telecommunications" outage. But nothing more at this point...
tosapple 1 days ago [-]
microsoft yesterday, funny.
latentsea 1 days ago [-]
Jensen the day before that, funny.
jmclnx 1 days ago [-]
I think I remember seeing an article here about air traffic controller systems moving off of 3.5" diskettes. Related ?
1 days ago [-]
neko_ranger 1 days ago [-]
"upgrade to cds. make no mistakes"
gosub100 1 days ago [-]
No, my guess is cyber attack from a state we've been making false accusations against.
junga 1 days ago [-]
Which one?
majorchord 1 days ago [-]
Too many enemies to guess at this point
ashdksnndck 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days ago [-]
So, "We have met the enemy and he is us?"
United857 1 days ago [-]
Is this the first such case since 9/11?
dole 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days 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.
kimos 18 hours ago [-]
I happened to be flying on that day through the US unfortunately. I can confirm it was not an FAA or a safety issue. Many airlines were still flying.
It was a nightmare, however. Some airlines couldn’t fly because their own systems were not working. Baggage was in limbo. Even the departure/arrival boards in the airport were error screens.
luxuryballs 12 hours ago [-]
yeah that's what I remember too, makes sense because iirc it was a software issue for flight/passenger management rather than airborne communications
Jtsummers 1 days 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 1 days ago [-]
no, there was one in 2023 when a pilot notification system went down
https://www.weather.gov/afc/radaroutage
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.
"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.
It was a nightmare, however. Some airlines couldn’t fly because their own systems were not working. Baggage was in limbo. Even the departure/arrival boards in the airport were error screens.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50489641
Extraordinary.
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.