Or Are We Under Attack?

By the time the sun went down Friday, the United States had grounded every departing flight in the country, sirens had sounded over a U.S. air base in England, and a tanker had struck a docked cruise ship on the Mississippi River. None of it, so far, is confirmed to be connected. All of it is confirmed to have happened.

At 3:54 p.m. Eastern, the FAA ordered every airport in America ground-stopped, “due to extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety.” The agency called it a temporary telecommunications outage. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said a communication issue hit all of the nation's Air Route Traffic Control Centers, and CNN reported that controllers lost radar and radio frequencies at the same time. By early evening, more than 10,500 flights were delayed and over 2,500 were canceled.

At the White House, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said there is no indication yet of a nefarious attack, and he said it plainly: this isn't another 9/11. But he would not close any door. “We're not ruling out anything at this point,” Mullin said. Asked whether artificial intelligence could be behind it, he answered, “We call it SI around here” — super intelligence — and added, “You just can't rule out anything.” His department is examining a possible link through CISA, the federal cybersecurity agency.

Two questions sit open tonight. The first is SMART, the FAA's AI traffic-planning system, expanded to all 22 en route centers on November 10 — three days before the sky emptied. The system recommends routes to human specialists; it does not fly planes, and its maker, Air Space Intelligence, says flatly that the ground stop “is not based on or a result of the SMART system.” The controllers' union had warned about SMART before this week, objecting that controllers were shut out of its design and testing, and lawmakers asked the FAA in October to pause it. The second question is the network itself: CBS News has reported that an update pushed Friday to the private communications network tying the control centers together, operated by L3Harris, crashed the system. Neither the FAA nor L3Harris has confirmed that account. The FAA's next update is expected around 11 p.m.

In England, the day had its own edge. U.S. European Command confirmed that Air Force security personnel at RAF Lakenheath responded Friday evening to suspected unauthorized drone activity, and that no personnel, aircraft or infrastructure were affected. Sirens sounded around 6:30 p.m. local time and personnel were told to shelter in place. Lakenheath and nearby RAF Mildenhall have sat at Force Protection Condition Charlie, the second-highest alert level, since Monday, after a threat from Iran reported by the Wall Street Journal; on Monday, ten American tanker aircraft left Mildenhall for bases across Europe. Reports tonight that the bases have gone to Delta, the highest level, are not confirmed.

Some of the fear, it turns out, isn't attached to anything real. The Microsoft 365 outage that began Thursday is a separate failure with its own technical cause, and Mullin said there's no reason to connect the two. The National Weather Service said Friday afternoon it was having nationwide internet and communications issues of its own; by evening it said its radars were fully operational, and no official has linked the two failures. The viral claim that Walmart, Costco and Target couldn't process payments traces back to a single unsourced post; Visa reports no incidents today, and Mastercard's network is running with 277 of its 279 components operational. And the Mississippi collision — the tanker Atlantic Asphalt into the docked American Heritage, the river closed, passengers rescued — is confirmed as an event and unexplained as a cause.

So: are we under attack? Odd coincidences don't mean an attack. They mean stay vigilant. It is a scary time when a country has to ask the question out loud — when one bad afternoon can empty the sky over America and empty a base in England. But scary isn't the same as connected, and connected isn't the same as confirmed.

So far, it's a series of strange events. If we get a confirm, you'll hear it here.