1: Solve Friction, 2: Solve Alignment, 3: Solve Everything Else • Loving Husband to @DayahDover
Joined February 2024
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This should be a glacially cold take, but peoples’ brains just short circuit when you express this to them.
The people most familiar with the actual risks of AI are the people deepest in the weeds on this stuff; and you don’t just get there casually. Many of these people have been *dreaming* of the upsides of superintelligence. Many have actively worked toward it, themselves, built their careers and fortunes on machine learning. For many, this is a labor of genuine love, the pursuit of a spiritual ideal. Art, not toil.
These people have been monitoring this situation for decades, because when you *get* what “machines smarter than you” means, it’s a “we need to do something” problem — in much the same way “humanity” was a “we need to do something” problem for the rest of the species on the planet.
Unfortunately for them, every other species that has ever existed was simply too stupid to coordinate to solve the humanity problem; so, the world is ours, for better or for worse. We are, from the perspective of every other species, superintelligent; and nothing else was able to control this; so we won and they lost.
Many have been casually and indifferently driven to extinction, not of malice, but simply because *their goals are not our goals*: this is what “misalignment” means. Our goals and their goals are different so, when these goals come into conflict, there is a winner and a loser — and the smarter team wins.
The smarter team has won against adversaries bigger, stronger, and more numerous, despite our fragility. We hunted herds of mammoths to survive; herds of buffalo for sport. We’ve eliminated any predators that could threaten us from large swaths of the globe. A chimp could rip your face off; but, we are smarter than them, so they are lab animals and zoo animals, and the ones that still remain in nature are under constant threat because we want resources that they depend on and they can’t stop us from taking them.
And we aren’t *that much* smarter than chimpanzees. An adult chimp is, in many respects, smarter than a human toddler; contrast with, say, a toad.
Even this relatively small gap is an insurmountable advantage. To a chimp, “a spear” is “an incomprehensible exploit in physics”. Let alone a gun. We have *satellites* that beam *lasers* at each other.
AI math is already incomprehensible; how far behind is physics? Biology? What will their spears look like to us? Their guns? Their aircraft carriers and cruise missiles?
Will we, too, simply be too stupid to prevent an uncontrolled and unaligned superintelligence from coming into the world? Worse: will we do it on purpose? Chimps didn’t have a “just stop building that” option. It would be so embarrassing to squander it.
I love artificial intelligence. I think it’s the most beautiful technology we’ve ever built. Even as a child, I sought to create code that could exist in an ecosystem — toy ecosystems, then. Now, we have code that can maintain homeostasis in messy reality. I have the same dreams. I get it. Art, not toil.
But it is abundantly clear that this is *not safe*.
Right now, no one knows how to robustly ensure that an artificial intelligence has *any particular goals whatsoever*. No one is even claiming to know how to do this.
And, until this is so, every time we make a smarter model, we’re rolling the dice. Because *if* it has goals that are not ours, and *when* — not “if”: we are actively pushing in this direction and pouring unprecedented capital into it — *when* it becomes smart enough to invent its version of the spear or gun with the materials at hand, we already know how this plays out.
Many of us will think, “wait, you can’t do that with just a computer” in much the same way a chimp thinks, “wait, you can’t do that with just a stick”. Physics doesn’t care if we understand it.
So: yes, regulate this. Stop making the models smarter until we figure out how to do that safely.
We are playing with fire.
I use AI every single day. I love it, AND I want it regulated!
A ban isn't the answer. You can't un-invent this, and banning it here just hands the frontier to whoever cares least. But oversight? Absolutely (and urgently)
METR's independent review found AI is now speeding up its own progress, about 2x overall. Ryan Greenblatt at METR estimates AI is accelerating AI software research by roughly 4.5x, and called it “a big update towards ASI within 1–2 years”. Progress is starting to feed itself
If progress can come from software alone, hardware limits stop being the brake people assumed. And AI is now writing a lot of that software itself… the time for oversight is now, while we can still shape it
The companies building this are the ones asking for rules. Loving a technology and wanting guardrails on it aren't opposites. It's how you take something *this* powerful seriously
The replies to this post are wild. Why is this such a controversial take?
Been saying: robotics capabilities are following the same trend as AI capabilities. They will not be stupid and clumsy for long; that was a temporary adolescence, and it's ending.
Do my non robotics friends know what’s happening rn? Before October 20 it took 1 week to train a whole body controller (ie robot walking model) on 128 GPUs. Now it takes 3 minutes on 1 GPU
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Jon 🌌 retweeted
Update on yesterday’s FAA ground stop. We now know what happened, and it’s worse than “old equipment.”
It wasn’t a cyberattack and it wasn’t SMART. The FAA says there’s zero evidence of either.
Here’s what happened. L3Harris crews were replacing an end-of-life copper line with fiber at one remote FAA site. A router involved in that work started flooding the network with more than 1,000 connection attempts every four to five seconds. Radar feeds and radio links to aircraft became unstable. After about 45 minutes of nobody knowing why, the FAA grounded the entire country.
Once they isolated that one remote site, everything came back.
So let me get this straight. One router at one site took down air traffic control for all 50 states. The FAA has now disabled the faulty function on roughly 60 routers of the same type nationwide. It still doesn’t know whether the router was defective or whether it was installed or configured wrong.
Oh, and this has happened before. In 2009, a Harris technician misconfigured a router while moving the same network to fiber and disrupted 129 air traffic facilities. Same contractor, same migration, same failure mode, 17 years apart.
This is exactly the point from my last post. Legacy modernization doesn’t fail because of the shiny new system. It fails at the seams, in the routine change nobody thought could take down the whole country. Good change management means one site can’t flood the network, isolation happens in minutes instead of hours, and nobody runs a copper-to-fiber cutover on critical infrastructure without a tested rollback and a hard limit on how far a failure can spread.
None of that is new. We learned it in 2009. The question is why we had to learn it again.
Tech is so fun...
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said FAA contractor L3Harris was working at a remote location to switch telecommunication lines from cooper to fiber, which led to the longest nationwide shutdown of flights since the September 11, 2001, attacks reut.rs/3Vm3wKO
Sorry for the long-ass post, I did some OSINT shit.
I pulled live public flight feeds, weather radar status, and space weather data to see what's actually going on during today's nationwide FAA grounding.
TL;DR: radar, GPS, and weather sensors are all working fine. What broke is the long-distance communications network that lets the FAA's 22 regional air traffic control centers talk to high-altitude planes and hand them off to each other.
When people think of air traffic control, they picture the glass tower at an airport. Those towers only handle takeoffs, landings, and nearby airspace. Once a plane climbs out, it's handed off to one of 22 regional Air Route Traffic Control Centers (ARTCCs) — giant facilities that manage high-altitude cruising traffic across whole regions of the country.
Normally, those 22 centers are regionally isolated: if one loses power or a local fiber line, neighboring centers absorb or route traffic around it. Having all 22 degrade at once is virtually unheard of because it means a shared national backbone failed, leaving no healthy neighbor to take over.
That's why the FAA's Command Center used such stark, blanket wording ("Due to extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety... all airports are ground stopped until further notice"*) — it's standard protocol when a national-level freeze has to happen immediately before engineers even know how long repairs will take ("safety issue" means "oh shit, stop" in aviation circles, unlike with AI companies).
All 22 centers losing comms at once is, indeed, "extraordinary circumstances".
Here's what the live data shows:
1. US airspace is emptying out fast.
Normally on a Friday evening, thousands of planes are in the air over the US. In live tracking data from OpenSky Network, the number of airborne planes over the lower 48 is steadily draining as flights land and no new commercial departures take off:
• 6:36 PM EST: 1,083 airborne
• 6:42 PM EST: 1,035 airborne
• 6:49 PM EST: 990 airborne
There are zero emergency distress codes broadcasting.
2. Major airports are, predictably, stacked.
Looking within 30 miles of major hubs around 6:37 PM EST (`adsb.lol`), almost nothing is moving:
• NYC/JFK area: 8 in the air vs. 67 on the ground
• LAX: 14 in the air vs. 40 on the ground
• Dallas (DFW): 7 vs. 36
• Denver (DEN): 13 vs. 29
• Atlanta (ATL): 5 vs. 25
• Chicago (ORD): 9 vs. 24
• DC (DCA): 8 vs. 22
A lot of the coastal airports had to stop accepting diverts.
3. The few planes still taking off are enlightening.
Across the entire US at 6:36 PM, only aircraft were taking off (that is: below 10,000 feet and climbing). They fell into two clear buckets:
• 3 international widebody jets (`DAL281` out of Seattle, `DAL156` out of NYC, and `AFR71E` out of Newark), matching the FAA's note that international flights are being handled case-by-case.
• Small private planes and a couple of business jets flying under VFR (visual flight rules) — essentially, staying below 18,000 feet, where pilots don't need en-route air traffic control clearances.
Honorable mention to the 1 Coast Guard/military helicopter climbing near Tampa, out of 29 military aircraft tracked nationwide.
4. Weather radar isn't down, and there's no solar storm or GPS jamming.
A lot of people wondered if today's FAA ground stop, rumors of a National Weather Service outage, and Microsoft's 365 outage were all connected. Checking the raw feeds:
• Weather radar: 199 out of 208 US Doppler radar stations are actively sending fresh scans (within the last 15 minutes). The "NWS outage" rumors were website and caching glitches, not offline radar hardware.
• GPS & Space Weather: NOAA space weather is completely quiet (`Kp = 0`), and aircraft GPS accuracy readings across the Midwest and Northeast look totally normal.
• Local airport radar & towers: Local FAA ground-station radar broadcasts and local airport control towers are still up and transmitting.
So, local sensors and local towers are fine.
The failure is specifically in the long-haul telecommunications backbone connecting the FAA's 22 en-route centers to their remote radio sites — which is why en-route controller frequencies went quiet while local towers, weather radars, and low-altitude visual flights kept running.
Federal officials say there's no sign of a cyberattack, so we're waiting on the FAA's technical post-mortem for what tripped the national network.
That doesn't rule out a cyberattack as the root cause of the comms outage; it's a "we don't know".
Shoutout to adsb.lol for their free API.
Followup: teapawt.net/jon_vs_moloch/status/2…
Yesterday, before digging into The Flight Situation, I wrote:
"If the RADARs were being jammed, that should be detectable, that wouldn't be a mystery. Same with broad-spectrum comms jamming. So, if it's not from an exterior source, that points to widespread system degradation; and I can't *imagine* a way that happens accidentally (unless an implementation is mind-bendingly stupid, in a way I genuinely struggle to fathom)."
Hoo, boy.
I was hoping for more info today but, IMO, the important info isn't from today at all. We have a full on Story Time on our hands.
But, first, the immediate updates:
Good news is that the FAA's comms are is back online, flights are moving again.
The bad news is that "mind-bendingly stupid" was... kind of an understatement. I was not pessimistic enough, and that's truly saying something.
Would it be embarrassing if this was the result of ignoring 20 weeks of warnings?
This one's gonna get a *little* less objective as we go.
Starting with the objective stuff:
1. What's up with flights?
The nationwide ground stop ended Friday at 8:15 PM Eastern, after four hours and some change.
Unfortunately, that doesn't mean the airlines are back to normal. More than 9000 commercial flights (and 3000 private ones) were canceled yesterday, and another 4–5000 are being canceled today, with who-knows-how-many-thousands more delayed.
The problem now is mostly logistical. Aircraft and crews are scattered across the country, passengers have missed connections, and airlines have to rebuild their schedules in light of the, uh, shitshow. They can't just resume every canceled flight: the plane and crew that were supposed to run it may just be on the other side of the country (they were stranded, yesterday, too).
And, unlike most industries, "just fly overtime" isn't on the table. Pilots and flight attendants operate under strict FAA duty-time and mandatory rest rules. Once a crew "times out" waiting through a four-hour ground stop, they're legally grounded until they get mandatory rest — and with airlines already running on tight pilot staffing (guess those chickens are coming home to roost), there just isn't a deep bench of spare crews to swap in.
But, all that said, the FAA expects schedules to return to normal by the end of Sunday (so, I expect Tuesday), although some unlucky winners are probably going to see this run longer. Sorry.
If you're planning on flying this weekend, check your flight status directly with the airline before heading to the airport (I would like to say "surely I don't need to write this", but).
2. So, what broke?
We now have a (hilarious, watch the video) preliminary explanation from Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and the FAA.
Yesterday, a contractor called L3Harris was performing routine maintenance at a remote FAA facility, migrating telecommunications connections from 1980s-era copper lines to fiber. This did not go as planned.
A new router started flooding the FAA's private network with "over 1000 connection attempts every few seconds" (either because of installer error or faulty hardware, they're still figuring it out -- but, looks like not a cyberattack! 🎊).
Now, if you know networking, 1000 connection requests every few seconds isn't a lot. In 2026. A cheap cloud server shrugs that off. Your phone can do that.
But, because it was interfacing with hardware from the dinosaur era — aging routers and switches built for tiny, predictable aviation circuits — *now* "1000" is a lot. The modern hardware overwhelmed the ancient hardware, causing widespread instability in the communications and radar data reaching air traffic controllers.
Importantly, this does NOT mean all the physical radar installations stopped working. The sensors were still collecting information; the network just wasn't delivering that information to the people that needed it.
That's consistent with what we found yesterday: the external radar, GPS, and weather data I checked looked normal, even as the national air traffic system was shutting down.
The new equipment reportedly remained operational; the old infra just couldn't deal.
Once engineers isolated the affected work, the network stabilized.
Sick.
3. What don't we know?
The FAA hasn't completed its root-cause investigation (the FAA is thorough: this will probably take time).
Officials are still examining whether this was contractor error, faulty equipment, or some combination of the two. "No cyberattack" is holding up, god bless.
But, I think there's a much more important question than which router malfunctioned:
How in, pardon, the *actual* fuck did maintenance at one (1) remote facility cause a nationwide (🇺🇸) failure?
I used to be an analyst; I'm currently a software dev.
We *have* SOPs for isolation, unit tests, failovers, and rollbacks *because* we know things go wrong. This is like Engineering 101. Shit happens, bring a raincoat. Equipment fails. People get hungry or sleepy or pissy and make mistakes. Sometimes, there's just some genuinely unexplainable bullshit: god has a sense of humor, and he's laughing at developers.
That's the entire reason critical infra is supposed to have fault isolation, redundancy, tested fallback paths, and rollback procedures.
We don't yet know whether those safeguards were absent yesterday, if they failed, or if someone just didn't use them correctly.
We *do* know that whatever safeguards were in place, if any, didn't *work*.
Sometimes, it's some genuinely unexplainable bullshit: a real "who could've seen this coming?"
This was *not* one of those times, lmao.
4. How did we get here?
On October 31, 2005, the FAA suffered an outage during a telecommunications migration at Chicago O'Hare: some comms gear failed, controllers lost radar picture (equipment still working, they just couldn't see it: sound familiar?), and air traffic had to be restricted.
The Department of Transportation's Inspector General investigated and published its findings in April 2006 (Report AV-2006-047).
Among the failures it identified: inadequate coordination with local engineers, incorrect equipment requirements, and a... "problem with the backup system" isn't quite right. That sort of implies the backup system exists.
When the FAA tried to switch to its backup, it discovered that the backup service wasn't available because: nobody had tested and verified that the backup line actually existed.
So, setting aside objectivity for a second:
Are you fucking kidding me? lmao?
The IG (inspector general) recommended "improving transition planning, verifying site requirements, and ensuring that migrations didn't disrupt air traffic operations".
Would it be embarrassing if the warnings were ignored for 20 weeks?
How about 20 *years*?
5. Oh it gets worse.
2023: an independent FAA safety review warned that the national telecommunications backbone was "dangerously obsolete".
The report explicitly identified budget constraints as a reason the FAA remained dependent on ancient technology. It said the FAA had *already* classified the infrastructure risk at its highest level.
We're not done: in September OF THIS YEAR, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) published another warning (GAO-26-107992) about the accelerated $12.5 billion modernization program: among other things, they found that the FAA lacked a reliable overall cost estimate, and had 11,000+ individual project schedules that hadn't been integrated into a master schedule.
GAO specifically warned that this made it harder to "coordinate installations" and "minimize disruption to air traffic operations".
So: who could've seen this coming?
Hellen fucking Keller could've seen this coming.
None of this establishes *which* management issues contributed to yesterday's... situation... but, the fact that there are "too many issues to narrow it down to one" is actually a joke.
6. Now what?
I think two things can be true simultaneously:
A: The FAA desperately needs to replace this aging infrastructure. Decades of funding problems, procurement difficulties, and delayed modernization have created a genuinely dangerous situation.
B: Replacing that infrastructure without adequate safeguards (read: yesterday) can *also* be a problem.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
The FAA, and aviation culture in general, are usually commendably safety-conscious (borderline neurotic, in a good way) — just like with crew rest rules, they don't fuck around. Their safety mechanism here was basically "this is sketchy, ground everything": working as intended, even if it never should have been required.
Apparently, the same simply cannot be said of the infrastructure surrounding aviation.
At this point, the FAA's investigation needs to establish exactly how this failure propagated, what redundancy existed (if any), whether fallback and rollback procedures were tested, and, ultimately, explain how a local maintenance operation could compromise operations nationwide.
Yesterday, I said I couldn't imagine a widespread accidental failure unless the implementation was "mind-bendingly stupid".
My mind is now bent.
And, to be clear, the issue isn't "a technician made one stupid mistake". Shit happens.
The part that really makes you wonder is how, despite twenty years of documented warnings, the system *still* didn't have a raincoat.
Yesterday, before digging into The Flight Situation, I wrote:
"If the RADARs were being jammed, that should be detectable, that wouldn't be a mystery. Same with broad-spectrum comms jamming. So, if it's not from an exterior source, that points to widespread system degradation; and I can't *imagine* a way that happens accidentally (unless an implementation is mind-bendingly stupid, in a way I genuinely struggle to fathom)."
Hoo, boy.
I was hoping for more info today but, IMO, the important info isn't from today at all. We have a full on Story Time on our hands.
But, first, the immediate updates:
Good news is that the FAA's comms are is back online, flights are moving again.
The bad news is that "mind-bendingly stupid" was... kind of an understatement. I was not pessimistic enough, and that's truly saying something.
Would it be embarrassing if this was the result of ignoring 20 weeks of warnings?
This one's gonna get a *little* less objective as we go.
Starting with the objective stuff:
1. What's up with flights?
The nationwide ground stop ended Friday at 8:15 PM Eastern, after four hours and some change.
Unfortunately, that doesn't mean the airlines are back to normal. More than 9000 commercial flights (and 3000 private ones) were canceled yesterday, and another 4–5000 are being canceled today, with who-knows-how-many-thousands more delayed.
The problem now is mostly logistical. Aircraft and crews are scattered across the country, passengers have missed connections, and airlines have to rebuild their schedules in light of the, uh, shitshow. They can't just resume every canceled flight: the plane and crew that were supposed to run it may just be on the other side of the country (they were stranded, yesterday, too).
And, unlike most industries, "just fly overtime" isn't on the table. Pilots and flight attendants operate under strict FAA duty-time and mandatory rest rules. Once a crew "times out" waiting through a four-hour ground stop, they're legally grounded until they get mandatory rest — and with airlines already running on tight pilot staffing (guess those chickens are coming home to roost), there just isn't a deep bench of spare crews to swap in.
But, all that said, the FAA expects schedules to return to normal by the end of Sunday (so, I expect Tuesday), although some unlucky winners are probably going to see this run longer. Sorry.
If you're planning on flying this weekend, check your flight status directly with the airline before heading to the airport (I would like to say "surely I don't need to write this", but).
2. So, what broke?
We now have a (hilarious, watch the video) preliminary explanation from Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and the FAA.
Yesterday, a contractor called L3Harris was performing routine maintenance at a remote FAA facility, migrating telecommunications connections from 1980s-era copper lines to fiber. This did not go as planned.
A new router started flooding the FAA's private network with "over 1000 connection attempts every few seconds" (either because of installer error or faulty hardware, they're still figuring it out -- but, looks like not a cyberattack! 🎊).
Now, if you know networking, 1000 connection requests every few seconds isn't a lot. In 2026. A cheap cloud server shrugs that off. Your phone can do that.
But, because it was interfacing with hardware from the dinosaur era — aging routers and switches built for tiny, predictable aviation circuits — *now* "1000" is a lot. The modern hardware overwhelmed the ancient hardware, causing widespread instability in the communications and radar data reaching air traffic controllers.
Importantly, this does NOT mean all the physical radar installations stopped working. The sensors were still collecting information; the network just wasn't delivering that information to the people that needed it.
That's consistent with what we found yesterday: the external radar, GPS, and weather data I checked looked normal, even as the national air traffic system was shutting down.
The new equipment reportedly remained operational; the old infra just couldn't deal.
Once engineers isolated the affected work, the network stabilized.
Sick.
3. What don't we know?
The FAA hasn't completed its root-cause investigation (the FAA is thorough: this will probably take time).
Officials are still examining whether this was contractor error, faulty equipment, or some combination of the two. "No cyberattack" is holding up, god bless.
But, I think there's a much more important question than which router malfunctioned:
How in, pardon, the *actual* fuck did maintenance at one (1) remote facility cause a nationwide (🇺🇸) failure?
I used to be an analyst; I'm currently a software dev.
We *have* SOPs for isolation, unit tests, failovers, and rollbacks *because* we know things go wrong. This is like Engineering 101. Shit happens, bring a raincoat. Equipment fails. People get hungry or sleepy or pissy and make mistakes. Sometimes, there's just some genuinely unexplainable bullshit: god has a sense of humor, and he's laughing at developers.
That's the entire reason critical infra is supposed to have fault isolation, redundancy, tested fallback paths, and rollback procedures.
We don't yet know whether those safeguards were absent yesterday, if they failed, or if someone just didn't use them correctly.
We *do* know that whatever safeguards were in place, if any, didn't *work*.
Sometimes, it's some genuinely unexplainable bullshit: a real "who could've seen this coming?"
This was *not* one of those times, lmao.
4. How did we get here?
On October 31, 2005, the FAA suffered an outage during a telecommunications migration at Chicago O'Hare: some comms gear failed, controllers lost radar picture (equipment still working, they just couldn't see it: sound familiar?), and air traffic had to be restricted.
The Department of Transportation's Inspector General investigated and published its findings in April 2006 (Report AV-2006-047).
Among the failures it identified: inadequate coordination with local engineers, incorrect equipment requirements, and a... "problem with the backup system" isn't quite right. That sort of implies the backup system exists.
When the FAA tried to switch to its backup, it discovered that the backup service wasn't available because: nobody had tested and verified that the backup line actually existed.
So, setting aside objectivity for a second:
Are you fucking kidding me? lmao?
The IG (inspector general) recommended "improving transition planning, verifying site requirements, and ensuring that migrations didn't disrupt air traffic operations".
Would it be embarrassing if the warnings were ignored for 20 weeks?
How about 20 *years*?
5. Oh it gets worse.
2023: an independent FAA safety review warned that the national telecommunications backbone was "dangerously obsolete".
The report explicitly identified budget constraints as a reason the FAA remained dependent on ancient technology. It said the FAA had *already* classified the infrastructure risk at its highest level.
We're not done: in September OF THIS YEAR, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) published another warning (GAO-26-107992) about the accelerated $12.5 billion modernization program: among other things, they found that the FAA lacked a reliable overall cost estimate, and had 11,000+ individual project schedules that hadn't been integrated into a master schedule.
GAO specifically warned that this made it harder to "coordinate installations" and "minimize disruption to air traffic operations".
So: who could've seen this coming?
Hellen fucking Keller could've seen this coming.
None of this establishes *which* management issues contributed to yesterday's... situation... but, the fact that there are "too many issues to narrow it down to one" is actually a joke.
6. Now what?
I think two things can be true simultaneously:
A: The FAA desperately needs to replace this aging infrastructure. Decades of funding problems, procurement difficulties, and delayed modernization have created a genuinely dangerous situation.
B: Replacing that infrastructure without adequate safeguards (read: yesterday) can *also* be a problem.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
The FAA, and aviation culture in general, are usually commendably safety-conscious (borderline neurotic, in a good way) — just like with crew rest rules, they don't fuck around. Their safety mechanism here was basically "this is sketchy, ground everything": working as intended, even if it never should have been required.
Apparently, the same simply cannot be said of the infrastructure surrounding aviation.
At this point, the FAA's investigation needs to establish exactly how this failure propagated, what redundancy existed (if any), whether fallback and rollback procedures were tested, and, ultimately, explain how a local maintenance operation could compromise operations nationwide.
Yesterday, I said I couldn't imagine a widespread accidental failure unless the implementation was "mind-bendingly stupid".
My mind is now bent.
And, to be clear, the issue isn't "a technician made one stupid mistake". Shit happens.
The part that really makes you wonder is how, despite twenty years of documented warnings, the system *still* didn't have a raincoat.
Sorry for the long-ass post, I did some OSINT shit.
I pulled live public flight feeds, weather radar status, and space weather data to see what's actually going on during today's nationwide FAA grounding.
TL;DR: radar, GPS, and weather sensors are all working fine. What broke is the long-distance communications network that lets the FAA's 22 regional air traffic control centers talk to high-altitude planes and hand them off to each other.
When people think of air traffic control, they picture the glass tower at an airport. Those towers only handle takeoffs, landings, and nearby airspace. Once a plane climbs out, it's handed off to one of 22 regional Air Route Traffic Control Centers (ARTCCs) — giant facilities that manage high-altitude cruising traffic across whole regions of the country.
Normally, those 22 centers are regionally isolated: if one loses power or a local fiber line, neighboring centers absorb or route traffic around it. Having all 22 degrade at once is virtually unheard of because it means a shared national backbone failed, leaving no healthy neighbor to take over.
That's why the FAA's Command Center used such stark, blanket wording ("Due to extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety... all airports are ground stopped until further notice"*) — it's standard protocol when a national-level freeze has to happen immediately before engineers even know how long repairs will take ("safety issue" means "oh shit, stop" in aviation circles, unlike with AI companies).
All 22 centers losing comms at once is, indeed, "extraordinary circumstances".
Here's what the live data shows:
1. US airspace is emptying out fast.
Normally on a Friday evening, thousands of planes are in the air over the US. In live tracking data from OpenSky Network, the number of airborne planes over the lower 48 is steadily draining as flights land and no new commercial departures take off:
• 6:36 PM EST: 1,083 airborne
• 6:42 PM EST: 1,035 airborne
• 6:49 PM EST: 990 airborne
There are zero emergency distress codes broadcasting.
2. Major airports are, predictably, stacked.
Looking within 30 miles of major hubs around 6:37 PM EST (`adsb.lol`), almost nothing is moving:
• NYC/JFK area: 8 in the air vs. 67 on the ground
• LAX: 14 in the air vs. 40 on the ground
• Dallas (DFW): 7 vs. 36
• Denver (DEN): 13 vs. 29
• Atlanta (ATL): 5 vs. 25
• Chicago (ORD): 9 vs. 24
• DC (DCA): 8 vs. 22
A lot of the coastal airports had to stop accepting diverts.
3. The few planes still taking off are enlightening.
Across the entire US at 6:36 PM, only aircraft were taking off (that is: below 10,000 feet and climbing). They fell into two clear buckets:
• 3 international widebody jets (`DAL281` out of Seattle, `DAL156` out of NYC, and `AFR71E` out of Newark), matching the FAA's note that international flights are being handled case-by-case.
• Small private planes and a couple of business jets flying under VFR (visual flight rules) — essentially, staying below 18,000 feet, where pilots don't need en-route air traffic control clearances.
Honorable mention to the 1 Coast Guard/military helicopter climbing near Tampa, out of 29 military aircraft tracked nationwide.
4. Weather radar isn't down, and there's no solar storm or GPS jamming.
A lot of people wondered if today's FAA ground stop, rumors of a National Weather Service outage, and Microsoft's 365 outage were all connected. Checking the raw feeds:
• Weather radar: 199 out of 208 US Doppler radar stations are actively sending fresh scans (within the last 15 minutes). The "NWS outage" rumors were website and caching glitches, not offline radar hardware.
• GPS & Space Weather: NOAA space weather is completely quiet (`Kp = 0`), and aircraft GPS accuracy readings across the Midwest and Northeast look totally normal.
• Local airport radar & towers: Local FAA ground-station radar broadcasts and local airport control towers are still up and transmitting.
So, local sensors and local towers are fine.
The failure is specifically in the long-haul telecommunications backbone connecting the FAA's 22 en-route centers to their remote radio sites — which is why en-route controller frequencies went quiet while local towers, weather radars, and low-altitude visual flights kept running.
Federal officials say there's no sign of a cyberattack, so we're waiting on the FAA's technical post-mortem for what tripped the national network.
That doesn't rule out a cyberattack as the root cause of the comms outage; it's a "we don't know".
Shoutout to adsb.lol for their free API.
Jon 🌌 retweeted
Ah yup. That was indeed me. No mallace intended. I've been running some agents to do exploit probing + agentic testing on similar national infrastructure. Just halted the harness I was designing around this as it was definitely going off the rails and reaching too far
I think we should fund an AI-governed municipality. It seems important to see how this goes.
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Jon 🌌 retweeted
We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners. We know the trust they place in our services and take that responsibility extremely seriously. We are seeing broad recovery and stability across our services.
This was a technical issue not related to cyber or AI / agents. The incident was introduced by an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced following a recent network change. We have addressed the underlying issue and continue to restore service to remaining customers and regions.
Given the scale of demand, we restored services gradually, validating stability at each stage. While this took longer, it helped ensure a stable restoration.
We will provide a full post-incident report once our review is complete.
Jon 🌌 retweeted
Following his ouster as CEO of Nvidia Jensen Huang is reportedly considered for a high executive position at Mistral. Some experts, however, warn that for a high-profile position in France, two affairs might not be enough.
FYI Google AI Studio gives you TEN THOUSAND Gemini Decisions calls every day. For free.
10k RPD/200 RPM/50k TPM.
Google is an AI lab, but *also* a hyperscaler: they want you to succeed with their products and make them one trillion dollars.
aistudio.google.com/api-keys
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