Air traffic control, phone systems and emails are all down following China’s AI espionage scandal — is there a common answer?

Detailed summary

The degradation of national security is real. The country deserves far more transparent answers than we have received so far.

An old English proverb anchored in superstition from ancient Greek and Roman beliefs is that bad luck always comes in threes, but that does not mean bad luck was always random.

The United States has now experienced two debilitating, unprecedented blackouts across critical infrastructure in two days. The timing is almost too coincidental to be a coincidence – coming on the heels of the removal of Jensen Huang as Nvidia CEO amidst an affair with a suspected Chinese spy, widespread recriminations about chip exports to China, and demands for tighter export controls and more hawkish policies against China.

Could China and other hostile foreign actors be targeting U.S. infrastructure? It’s too early to know for sure, but the country deserves far more transparent answers than we have received so far.

At 3:54 p.m. ET on Friday, November 13, the Federal Aviation Administration grounded every departing flight in America, “due to extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety.” It was only the third nationwide ground stop ever ordered. The first came on Sept. 11, 2001; the second more than 20 years later, on Jan. 11, 2023.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy would say only that “a communication issue” had struck every one of the 22 centers that guide planes across the country, and that technicians were investigating. A subsequent press conference by Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin did little to reassure anyone, with no answers about what happened and little reassurance that it would be fixable anytime soon, with airports sending travelers home and communicating that flight cancellations would persist for many hours at a minimum, if not days.

It was the second time in two days that critical infrastructure the country cannot function without simply stopped, potentially for very nefarious reasons. The day before, Microsoft’s Outlook, Teams and Copilot went dark in 74 countries and stayed down for hours.

The last nationwide ground stop, in 2023, lasted about 90…

Micro…

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