Along with their claim of needing $50 billion to fix it.

Because it definitely is. It's so embarrassing that how much everything about their reasons are bull shit that I don't even feel like it's worth the effort to debunk it anymore.

Like, is there anyone out there actually believing the crap they regurgitated?

"It's not the new AI systems, all they do is provide information (data). They aren't connected in anyway"

"All we know is that the server infrastructure was overloaded with data"

Like, they added the new AI systems and they ddosed themselves. I'm not quoting directly. But that's basically what the white house briefing said last night.

This wire crap screams of someone looking for any minor and unrelated problem that occurred yesterday to place blame on. There probably was a construction project that had some problem yesterday. It definitely wasn't the cause though.

That's the fun part about old equipment that's been running for decades. Sometimes when it goes down, it doesn't come back up.

Edit: also, https://xkcd.com/2347/

Bgp could happen to you.

Why does that sound like bs

Because it puts the onus on you to string together a lot of "maybe" and "if" to get something as a workable explanation. IF by "copper wire" they didn't mean ethernet cable, but instead it was some analog cable, then MAYBE the wire getting cut started getting interpreted as garbage that was going out to a larger network.

There are already a lot of "this is what happened" stories floating around, and they can't all be true. It is plausible that one thing going wrong at one busy airport would have cascading effects. It happens with weather all the time, and some of those delays last longer than the four hours and change the flights were grounded.

The article says "a contractor for the Federal Aviation Administration was working at a remote location" which doesn't answer any questions, but opens up a whole lot of other questions. Can a malicious actor just saunter up to the right "remote location" with a pair of wire cutters and ground the whole US? And all of this was on top of SpaceX having debris cause flight issues, AND it was the first day of a test of an AI flight routing program.

The aging ATC system needing to be overhauled is a trope at this point. I can't ever remember a single comment/anecdote/experience that tilted towards "this is fine and it should stay this way forever," except for maybe the people with the power of the purse who aren't accountable for aging infrastructure apparently.

I don’t disagree but from my understanding the affected areas were O Hare, Newark and a couple other airports. Those are extremely large airports and have flights coming from all over the country. I think they were trying to mitigate any new flights flying over their airpspace without having comms so they grounded everyone.

Very poetic if we based the cyber requirements off the old cold war "survive a nuclear strike" requirements, then misapplied those new requirements to the old systems (à la can't run Windows Defender if the system doesn't use Windows) causing new infrastructure to be added that caused the whole system to fail.

This is the story I want to be true, that somewhere in the system there's a protocol that's exactly so many bits and no more which worked fine for when it was designed, and AI slop masters rolled up and starting shoving JSON over that infrastructure.

I will laugh my ass off if the infrastructure only gets upgraded due to six months of whining by the AI crowd overpowering the last decades of all the first hand human reports from people who work in/with/around the ATC system. Here's hoping we eventually get a congress stupid enough to fall for the arugment that all our crumbling bridges need to be rebuilt because we can't transport heavy AI equipment over them.

I also hear that for AI to streamline the healthcare system that we need more rural hospitals and more pay for nurses. Likewise AI can't bring the cost of education down without paying teachers more. We can't get AI to the schools unless every school is connected to a high speed top of the line fiber network!