Please tell me these aren’t related

FTA:

Duffy said the ground stoppage was issued after experts saw “instability for our radar and our communications in our centers and our coms across the country.”

That’d be a weird wiring harness to hook into RF communications (read from a different article), air traffic radar, AND their network connecting their centers.

He went on to say, “So we have TDM telecom. This is analog telecom. Our switches, our routers, actually got overloaded with data and they went down. I shouldn’t say they went down. They started to give us inconsistency in the data from those routers, and because of that we shut the system down.”

First off, given all the other measures this admin attempts to save face, grounding the planes was the right call. Good job and please do it again if this situation ever comes up again.

OK, so you went to bed Thursday and your network, while old, was sized correctly for the network traffic you have. You get into Friday and it’s overloaded? Were they pushing new AI traffic over the old network without upgrades, or pushing it over radios? Were they network routers or some other tech? I don’t think there’s enough information yet to make a call here.

One really, really good path forward, since this seems to be the first time something like this has happened, is to put the NTSB on it and have them run their full investigative process. This time it might not’ve been a cyber attack, but this is what it’ll look like, so anything the NTSB turns up in terms of not having data to reconstruct the events should be treated as some sort of finding. Presumably the old ATC system held on so long because it comes from a day when strict system requirements were designed to and adhered to, and if new-fangled AI slop companies are going to swoop in and expect to “oops, you’re totally right, I shouldn’t have saved time by ramming those two airliners together in mid air” then this is the absolute time to put a stop to it.

So to answer your question: we don’t really know yet, but we should.

It’s ok, everybody. The AI company that vibecoded the new AI traffic management tool says it wasn’t their tool..

(Seriously, though, any company that calls itself an “AI frontier company” shouldn’t be trusted, particularly where there’s a huge conflict of interest like this one.)