On Friday 13 November 2026 the FAA halted departures nationwide for several hours after what it called a communication issue at its air traffic control centres. The cause has not been determined, and officials have said they cannot yet rule out a newly rolled-out AI tool; its developer says it was not involved.
What happened on 13 November
According to Al Jazeera’s report, which draws on AP, Bloomberg, CBS News and flight-tracking data, the FAA ordered the ground stop on the afternoon of 13 November and lifted it at 8:15 pm Eastern. The communication issue affected all 22 air route traffic control centres. FlightAware figures cited by CBS News put delays above 10,000 flights and cancellations at no fewer than 4,000; AP estimated about 1.5 million passengers were affected.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy blamed ageing infrastructure and instability in radar and communications systems, saying the agency’s “switches, our routers actually got overloaded with data” and that the system was shut down as a result. He said radar and communications were never fully lost and that the problem has been fixed. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said there was no indication of a threat. Bloomberg reported that the FBI does not believe a cyberattack or criminal activity was responsible and that investigators are examining whether a software update could have been the cause.
Where the AI question comes from
The AI angle rests on timing. The FAA has been adopting SMART (Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories), a tool built by Boston-based Air Space Intelligence (ASI) under an $875 million contract. Al Jazeera reports the FAA announced on 10 November that it would extend the system across all 22 centres. Asked about it, Mullin did not rule it out, saying: “You just can’t rule out anything at this point.” ASI’s statement was direct: “The current ground stop is not based on or a result of the SMART system.”
Those two statements are not in conflict: one declines to exclude a possibility, the other denies it. No reporting to date establishes that SMART or any AI component contributed to the outage.
What SMART is designed to do
In an NPR interview republished by OPB on 1 October, ASI chief executive Phillip Buckendorf described SMART as an advisory tool for traffic managers that draws on more than 200 data sources, including weather, congestion, winds and runway closures, to recommend routing and scheduling. He said: “This is not about automating air traffic control” and “The machine never makes a decision.” Controllers still keep aircraft separated. At that point the system was beginning as a pilot at three Washington, D.C.-area airports.
What this means for researchers and research offices
This is an open investigation, so the useful lessons are about method rather than blame.
- Co-occurrence is not causation. A new AI deployment and a major outage landing in the same week is a hypothesis to test against logs, change records and the timeline, not a finding. Reports so far point investigators at network and software-update questions first.
- Advisory tools sit inside larger systems. Evaluating whether an AI component is safe requires evidence about its integration: what data it consumes, what it can change, and what fails if it misbehaves. The NIST AI Risk Management Framework and the safety-case approach both frame assurance at the system level.
- Incident investigation needs a defined method. Structured approaches such as root cause analysis separate triggering events from contributing conditions, which matters when a single outage has several plausible causes.
- Public incident records enable research. Resources such as the AI Incident Database only help if reports distinguish confirmed AI involvement from suspected involvement.
- Organisations deploying AI need a response path. See how an internal AI incident response program is structured.
What is still unknown
The root cause of the outage has not been published, the FAA’s own account of the 13 November event has not identified a trigger, and whether the software update investigators are examining relates to SMART or to anything else has not been stated in the reporting available. This page will be superseded as official findings are released.
