US flight grounding, Microsoft outage and AI turmoil fuel cybersecurity fears
A Microsoft outage, turbulence in tech stocks and Silicon Valley upheaval around an AI billionaire—including infidelity allegations involving an alleged Chinese spy—were already rattling public confidence when, on Friday afternoon, US authorities ordered every plane in the country to land at once. For many, the coincidence of grounded jets, stalled computers and other shocks raised the question of whether highly connected systems were failing or under attack. Officials later offered more mundane causes. A technology upgrade to the national air-traffic-control system overloaded old equipment and produced intermittent communications and radar gaps, prompting a ground stop that lasted more than four hours. By Saturday morning travel was smoother; Federal Aviation Administration administrator Bryan Bedford said airline schedules should be back to normal by late Sunday. Microsoft said the same day that its services were fully restored after a problem introduced during an earlier network capacity upgrade surfaced following a recent network change; the outage is believed to have hit many millions of people worldwide. Both the FAA and Microsoft said they saw no sign of malicious activity. Travellers still felt the shock. Chuck Amasio, 68, of Rahway, New Jersey, had his flight from Newark Liberty International Airport cancelled, spent the night in a hotel after drinks with his brother, and returned Saturday; he spoke of wars fought by shutting airspace or a power grid. Maxine Gustafson, a 34-year-old physician assistant from Minneapolis, queued for a rental car at Chicago O’Hare so she and colleagues could get home from training, and wondered if it was a cyberattack. At San Diego International Airport’s Terminal 2 on Saturday morning, 11 of 62 flights were cancelled and as many delayed; Tori Perkins, 34, of Hawaii, on a layover toward family in Florida, had spent Friday night at the airport and doubted official accounts. Friday also brought a cruise ship overturned in New Orleans after a tanker hit it, reports of suspicious drones over a US air base in Britain, and a bomb found near an ethanol plant in Ohio. Writer Stephen King joked on social media that aliens explained the ground stop.
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