Maybe the trouble started with the AI billionaire and the Silicon Valley chaos that followed talk of his infidelity, including with an alleged Chinese spy. Or maybe it was the Microsoft outage that, depending on how you looked at it, either cast millions of frustrated workers adrift or spared them from a daily, unrelenting electronic avalanche.
But by Friday afternoon, when U.S. authorities suddenly ordered every plane across the country to land immediately, it felt to many that something was up. Something was broken.
Just ask Chuck Amasio, a 68-year-old from Rahway, New Jersey, trying to fly out of Newark Liberty International Airport when his canceled flight led to a few beers with his brother in an airport bar and eventually a night in a hotel. Saturday morning, he was back at the airport to try again.
“There’s a lot of weird stuff going on,” Amasio said. “It makes one think.”
His first thought was dark: “We talk about how wars aren’t done with bombs anymore. They shut down airspace or a power grid. They can cripple an economy.”
Throw in a few more examples just from Friday – a cruise ship that overturned in New Orleans when a tanker slammed into it, suspicious drones over a U.S. air base in Britain, a bomb found near an ethanol plant in Ohio — and perhaps things seem even weirder, opening the door for a writer who has been picking at America’s fears for generations to offer his own explanation.
“The aliens have landed,” Stephen King wrote in a Friday afternoon tweet. “That’s the REAL reason for the ground stop. They don’t want to start a worldwide panic.”
AARON SCHWARTZ via Getty Images
The official explanations for the thousands of downed jetliners and hours of email and other computer troubles were far more prosaic.
A technology upgrade on the nation’s air traffic control system had overloaded antiquated equipment and caused “intermittent” communications and radar gaps, leading to the ground stop that lasted more than four hours, administration officials said.
By Saturday morning, air travel was already smoother and Bryan Bedford, administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, said airline schedules should be back to normal by late Sunday.
Microsoft, for its part, said Saturday that its services had been fully restored, saying the problem “was introduced by an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced” following a recent network change.
The outage is believed to have affected many millions of people around the world.
‘Is this a cyberattack?’
Maxine Gustafson, a 34-year-old physician assistant from Minneapolis, was in line to pick up a hastily booked rental car at Chicago’s O’Hare airport on Friday afternoon so she and colleagues could get home from a work training.
Gustafson said the week’s mishaps made her feel afraid and helpless.
“It makes you think, like, is this a cyberattack?” she said. “We don’t have control over a lot of this stuff.”
Both the FAA and Microsoft said there were no signs that malicious activity had been behind the troubles.
Tori Perkins, 34, was hoping for a Saturday flight at Terminal 2 at San Diego International Airport, where 11 of the 62 flights already were listed as canceled that morning and the same number were delayed. Crowds were normal.
“It’s one of those things where I don’t necessarily believe what the government says,” said Perkins, who seemed to take the setback in stride. “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 on her way to see family in Florida. She spent Friday night at the airport.
She was not surprised that Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy had made a plea Friday for tens of billions in more funding to upgrade the country’s notoriously outdated air traffic system.
“It sounds like more of the same,” she said.
The FAA has already replaced thousands of copper wire connections with fiber optic lines and upgraded hundreds of radio systems as part of the overhaul that began last year after Congress approved $12.5 billion in funding. The White House has been pushing for $30 billion more to complete the work.
Bright spots 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 heading back to Moline, Illinois, from Miami, where he had been at an education conference.
He said everyone was cordial on the plane, talking to one another and stretching their legs. He was impressed with the American Airlines staff, who handed out water, pretzels and biscotti snacks, though they were clearly under stress.
“The stewardesses were amazing,” said the 37-year-old high school teacher.
Back at the Newark airport, Caroline Ruiz had caught a few hours of sleep by a heating vent. She wasn’t sure what time it was as she waited for someone to bring her a meal she was promised after the cancellation of the first leg of her 24-hour trip to Australia. She hoped to get started later Saturday.
It was two days in a row, she noted, where she had been betrayed by technology.
Though maybe one of those days didn’t count as a betrayal.
“I kind of got a free day yesterday” because the 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.
