Could everything be broken? Grounded jets, Microsoft outage, AI chaos make some wonder

Detailed summary

Maybe the trouble started with the AI billionaire and the Silicon Valley chaos that followed talk of his infidelity, including with an alleged Chinese spy. Or maybe it was the…

Maybe the trouble started with the AI billionaire and the Silicon Valley chaos that followed talk of his infidelity, including with an alleged Chinese spy. Or maybe it was the Microsoft outage that, depending on how you looked at it, either cast millions of frustrated workers adrift or spared them from a daily, unrelenting electronic avalanche.

But by Friday afternoon, when U.S. authorities suddenly ordered every plane across the country to land immediately, it felt to many that something was up. Something was broken.

Just ask Chuck Amasio, a 68-year-old from Rahway, New Jersey, trying to fly out of Newark Liberty International Airport when his canceled flight led to a few beers with his brother in an airport bar and eventually a night in a hotel. Saturday morning, he was back at the airport to try again.

“There’s a lot of weird stuff going on,” Amasio said. “It makes one think.”

His first thought was dark: “We talk about how wars aren’t done with bombs anymore. They shut down airspace or a power grid. They can cripple an economy.”

Throw in a few more examples just from Friday – a cruise ship that overturned in New Orleans when a tanker slammed into it, suspicious drones over a U.S. air base in Britain, a bomb found near an ethanol plant in Ohio — and perhaps things seem even weirder, opening the door for a writer who has been picking at America’s fears for generations to offer his own explanation.

“The aliens have landed,” Stephen King wrote in a Friday afternoon tweet. “That’s the REAL reason for the ground stop. They don’t want to start a worldwide panic.”

The official explanations for the thousands of downed jetliners and hours of email and other computer troubles were far more prosaic.

A technology upgrade on the nation’s air traffic control system had overloaded antiquated equipment and caused “intermittent” communications and radar gaps, leading to the ground stop that lasted more than four hours, administration officials said.

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