IMO theyre keeping it under wraps for one of these reasons:

• it was an attack and they dont want panic
• it was yet another huge failure of "ai" bullshit and they can't upset shareholders any longer so need to keep secret
• it was floppies

I was on a flight when everything was grounded. I asked the pilot and he could neither confirm nor deny that it’s aliens.

My connecting flight was cancelled so I split a $600 Uber with four strangers

We never had these kinds of outages before they got rid of DEI.

My theory: Trump Admin hired someone incompetent and they fucked up the comms. I mean that just the theme of trump admins basically

The actual advisory from the FAA is:

ATCSCC Advisory
ATCSCC 111 DCC 11/13/2026 NATIONAL GROUND STOP
MESSAGE:  	

EVENT TIME: 13/2053 - 14/0400
DUE TO EXTRAORDINARY CIRCUMSTANCES AND FOR REASONS OF SAFETY.
ATTENTION ALL AIRCRAFT OPERATORS, BY ORDER OF THE FEDERAL AVIATION
COMMAND CENTER ALL AIRPORTS ARE GROUND STOPPED. ALL DEPARTING
TRAFFIC SHOULD REMAIN GROUND STOPPED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. INBOUND
INTERNATIONAL FLIGHTS WILL BE MANAGED ON A CASE BY CASE BASIS. 

EFFECTIVE TIME:  	132054 - 140430
SIGNATURE:  	26/11/13 20:54  

Source: https://www.fly.faa.gov/ois/oisedit/adv_oisedit_dis?number=111&day=11132026&gdp=-1&gstop=196093

Beyond that, all I've seen so far is:

Markwayne Mullin, the secretary of homeland security, says Trump administration officials blamed a telecommunication outage but said they did not know its cause and that it would “take some time” to fix the issues grounding flights.

per NYT's reporting: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/11/13/us/ground-stop-nationwide-flights-faa/d2ae2ce1-ac6b-59ad-ad8d-daef4e181b34

Edit (longer quote further down from Mullin):

Markwayne Mullin, the secretary of homeland security, blamed the ground stop on a telecommunication outage but said Trump administration officials did not know the cause, adding that it would take an extended period of time to fix the issues. “This isn’t going to just be resolved and turned around within the hour,” he said. “This is going to take some time.”

Olivia Rinaldi was claiming over on Twitter that the FAA did an update to their telecommunications equipment, which caused a reboot. However when the system rebooted it immediately crashed. So since their communications are borked they just grounded everything.

Is it true? No idea.

Outlook and Teams outage /s

There's no official word, but to add some context, the FAA deployed a new AI-powered computer system for air traffic control yesterday.

Again, no proof that that's what's going on. But it sure is interesting.

Seems to be "communication issue": FAA issues nationwide ground stop on all departing flights, citing 'communication issue'"Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said Friday that there's “no indication as of yet that this was a nefarious attack against us.”"!asklemmy@lemmy.world

My brother is an ATC. He didn'y have any more info yet, but I'll update this comment when he knows more.

Edit: Just had dinner with him and he didn't have any official info. He did say that

1. He didn't buy the official story of there being a communication issue between airports. It just doesn't make sense based on how those communications networks function (sorry wish I had more detail here. he went into copper wire laid in the 1960s and how it's different than just the public Internet.) But they wouldn't ground crop dusters and planes flying VFR out of small airports if it were a communication issue.

2. The AI rollout that has been in the news also very likely has nothing to do with it. Absolutely NO controllers have been breifed on any new systems, so it's likely just something to grab a headline from the Trump administration.

It was his day off but his work called twice while we were at dinner trying to get him to come in.

Trump heard ‘the copilot’ was down and thought ‘but how are they going to land the planneesss? And grounded the country

Well the news places just had a story a day or two ago about how they were rolling out AI air traffic control systems nationwide. Could be that their new AI shit the bed right away

does this include flights for medical reasons? Like transporting rare antivenom, and organs, and patients? I wonder how many people this will kill

I just now read regional traffic control centers, which link all the others, got overloaded with data traffic because the FAA communication system is a patchwork mess - multiple generations of new tech integrated with old legacy systems and each other over a long span of time. That kind of setup can be nursed and prodded along for years by dedicated maintainers, but at some point the upside-down Slurpee cup that's been holding up one end of the shelf crumples and everything falls on the floor.