US: chaos in the skies – flights suspended for four hours, thousands of cancellations

The United States has been plunged into chaos in the air transport sector. Shortly after 4 pm local time on Friday (10 pm in Italy), the Federal Aviation Administration ordered a nationwide flight ban “due to extraordinary circumstances”, raising fears of tragic scenarios. After almost five hours, the ban was lifted, but the toll was heavy: over 10,000 flights delayed or cancelled, with tens of thousands of passengers stranded. The government warned that the disruption would continue for some time. In the early hours of the ban, CNN was still reporting that 700 aircraft were in the air and that the situation was “far from a return to normality”.

The government immediately ruled out the worst-case scenarios. “This is not another 9/11,” assured Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin, explaining that all aircraft in the air had been constantly tracked and had landed safely. Mullin also denied any link to the previous day’s disruption to Microsoft services, a fact confirmed by the company itself. President Donald Trump, according to a report by Peter Doocy of Fox News, is said to have indicated that this was neither a cyber-attack nor a problem linked to artificial intelligence, but rather a result of obsolete equipment, some of which was fifty years old.

Transport Secretary Sean Duffy attributed the failure to “switches and routers that were absolutely choked with data” in the air traffic control infrastructure and described it as a “genuine emergency”, warning that without maintenance the system “will continue to fail”. He has asked Congress for $50 billion to modernise the infrastructure. According to CBS, the collapse was reportedly caused by an update to the private communications network linking the air traffic control system, which triggered a reboot and brought the system – managed by L3Harris – to a standstill: the company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Federal authorities are continuing their technical investigations to ensure the full and stable restoration of the systems. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the US Embassy are monitoring the situation.