Saturday, 14 November 2026
The FAA Stops Every US Departure for Four Hours; Its AI Routing Contractor Says It Wasn't Them
The FAA Stops Every US Departure for Four Hours; Its AI Routing Contractor Says It Wasn’t Them
At about 4 p.m. Eastern on Friday, the FAA halted every departing flight in the United States — only the second nationwide ground stop since 9/11 — after a telecommunications failure hit its Air Route Traffic Control Centers, the 22 facilities that run traffic above 18,000 feet. It lifted the stop at 8:15 p.m. By then more than 10,000 flights had been disrupted, over 2,000 canceled and about 600 diverted; delays run into the weekend. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said overloaded routers “went down” and that the aging system is “going to continue to fail.” The awkward timing: on November 10 the FAA said its AI routing tool, SMART, which pulls more than 200 data streams into route and schedule recommendations for controllers, was now active in all those same centers — weeks after more than two dozen lawmakers asked how it had been safety-tested, and while the controllers’ union complains it was left out. The contractor behind it, Air Space Intelligence, said the stop was “not based on or a result of the SMART system.” Asked if the two were linked, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said: “we’re looking at that.” Not a yes. Not quite a no.
Source: ABC News, November 13, 2026
Microsoft’s Global Outage Was “Not Related to Cyber or AI / Agents,” Microsoft Says
The same week, Microsoft 365 went down from Thursday into Friday: Outlook, Teams and Copilot, across 74 countries and territories by Downdetector’s count. Microsoft first blamed “elevated load” after a network capacity upgrade, then refined it: the fault “was introduced by an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced following a recent network change.” It added a sentence nobody would have needed two years ago: “This was a technical issue not related to cyber or AI / agents.” Then the apology — “We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners” — and, by Saturday, “broad recovery and stability.” Two of the week’s biggest outages, two companies ruling out AI before anyone formally asked. Ruling out the robot is now part of the incident report template.
DeepMind Opens the Rain and Satellite Data Behind WeatherNext 3
Google DeepMind and Google Research released two datasets they use to train WeatherNext 3, free for anyone under CC BY 4.0. SatWeave stitches five geostationary satellites — GOES-East and West, two Meteosats and Himawari — into one global, analysis-ready picture of clouds and storms at about 10 km, hourly from 2026 and half-hourly back to 2016. PARDIG estimates rainfall across the globe every 15 minutes at the same resolution, in a near-real-time version (2016 to now, published about five hours behind) and a long record from 1999 to 2023. Google’s own test: trained on PARDIG, WeatherNext 3’s rain forecasts made about 15% less error than with the older satellite rain product, and about 30% less than WeatherNext 2 at short range. Google is plain about the limits — experimental, not a warning service, weaker over mountains, snow and drizzle. For a country with more mountains than rain radars, that last line is the one to read twice.