United States: FAA suspends all flights in the country until further notice

This is an extremely rare order. This Friday, the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration), responsible for air traffic control in the United States, suspended all flights until further notice. The agency justified this measure by “extraordinary circumstances” and “security reasons”.

The FAA decreed this takeoff ban “following a communications problem affecting all air traffic control centers,” according to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy in a message on X.

“Not a new September 11”

“There is currently no indication that this is a malicious attack against us. “It’s just a telecommunications outage at the moment,” responded US Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, quoted by the New York Times.

“This is not a new September 11,” he added to the press at the White House. The minister, however, refused to rule out any possibility, including that of a cyberattack, admitting that he did not know the cause of this communication problem.

Artificial intelligence in question

According to Reuters, this is only the second time since the attacks of September 11, 2001 that the United States has experienced a national suspension of plane departures. The previous one dates back to January 11, 2023. The FAA then interrupted takeoffs for about two hours, after a breakdown in its pilot notification computer system.

Furthermore, this outage comes just days after the FAA announced that it would begin deploying an artificial intelligence tool nationally. The latter was intended to help air traffic controllers avoid delays.