Maybe the problems started with AI billionaire and the Silicon Valley chaos that followed discussions of his infidelity, including with an alleged Chinese spy. Or maybe it was the Microsoft outage which, depending on how you look at it, has either left millions of frustrated workers adrift or spared them from a relentless, daily electronic avalanche.
But Friday afternoon, when American authorities suddenly ordered as every plane across the country landed immediately, many felt like something was up. Something was broken.
Just ask Chuck Amasio, a 68-year-old from Rahway, New Jersey, who was trying to leave Newark Liberty International Airport when his canceled flight landed him a few beers with his brother at an airport bar and ultimately a night in a hotel. Saturday morning, he was back at the airport to try again.
“There’s a lot of strange things happening,” Amasio said. “It makes you think.”
His first thought was grim: “We’re talking about the fact that wars are no longer fought with bombs. They shut down airspace or a power grid. They can cripple an economy.”
Add a few more examples from Friday – a cruise ship that overturned in New Orleans when an oil tanker hit it, suspicious drones above an American air base in Great Britain, a bomb found near an ethanol plant in Ohio — and perhaps things seem even stranger, opening the door for a writer who has preyed on America’s fears for generations to offer his own explanation.
“The aliens have landed,” Stephen King wrote in a tweet Friday afternoon. “This is the REAL reason for the ground stop. They don’t want to start a global panic.”
The official explanations for the thousands of downed airliners and hours of email and other computer problems were far more prosaic.
A technological upgrade of the country’s air traffic control system had overloaded outdated equipment and caused “Intermittent” communications and radar gapsleading to the ground stop that lasted more than four hours, administration officials said.
As of Saturday morning, air travel was already smoother, and Bryan Bedford, administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, said airline schedules should return to normal by Sunday evening.
Microsoft, for its part, indicated on Saturday that its services had been completely restored, claiming that the problem “was introduced by an issue during a previous network capacity upgrade that appeared” following a recent network change.
The outage is believed to have affected several million people around the world.
“Is this a cyberattack?
Maxine Gustafson, a 34-year-old physician assistant from Minneapolis, was waiting in line to pick up a hastily booked rental car at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport Friday afternoon so she and her colleagues could return home from job training.
Gustafson said the week’s incidents left her feeling scared and helpless.
“It makes you think: Is this a cyberattack? » she said. “We don’t have control over a lot of things.”
The FAA and Microsoft said there were no signs that malicious activity caused the problems.
Tori Perkins, 34, was hoping for a flight Saturday at Terminal 2 at San Diego International Airport, where 11 of 62 flights were already listed as canceled that morning and the same number were delayed. The crowds were normal.
“It’s one of those things where I don’t necessarily believe what the government says,” said Perkins, who seemed to accept the setback with enthusiasm. “I don’t know what’s true because there are so many people saying different things.”
Perkins, who lives in Hawaii, was in San Diego on a layover to visit family in Florida. She spent Friday evening at the airport.
She wasn’t surprised that Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy appealed Friday for tens of billions of dollars more to modernize the nation’s notoriously outdated air traffic system.
“It looks pretty much the same,” she said.
The FAA has already replaced thousands of copper wire connections with fiber optic lines and the modernization of hundreds of radio systems as part of the overhaul that began last year after Congress approved $12.5 billion in funding. The White House is asking for an additional $30 billion to complete the work.
Positives ease concerns
Sometimes chaos brings out the best in people.
Corbyn Wascher was stuck on the tarmac at Charlotte Douglas International Airport for four hours while returning to Moline, Illinois, from Miami, where he was attending an educational conference.
He said everyone was cordial on the plane, talking to each other and stretching their legs. He was impressed by the American Airlines staff, who handed out water, pretzels and biscotti, even though they were clearly stressed.
“The flight attendants were amazing,” said the 37-year-old high school teacher.
Back at Newark airport, Caroline Ruiz had slept for a few hours near a heating vent. She wasn’t sure what time it was as she waited for someone to bring her the meal she had been promised after the first leg of her 24-hour trip to Australia was canceled. She hoped to start later Saturday.
It was two days in a row, she noted, that she had been betrayed by technology.
But maybe one of these days didn’t count as a betrayal.
“I kind of had a free day yesterday” because Microsoft systems were down.
___
Associated Press journalists Elliot Spagat in San Diego, Ali Swenson in Chicago, Jessica Hill in Las Vegas and Aron Ranen in Newark contributed to this report.
Gn bussni
