FAA halts all takeoffs in US

For only the third time this century, the Federal Aviation Administration has halted all takeoffs from US airports due to a communications issue:

Sean Duffy, the secretary of transportation, confirmed the outage in a social media post, citing “a communication issue impacting all Air Route Traffic Control Centers.”

“FAA technicians are investigating the issue,” he added. “We will provide immediate updates as we have them.”

Before the advisory was published, the F.A.A. halted flights to Chicago’s O’Hare and Midway airports, citing equipment problems, and reported equipment-related departure delays at Newark, Las Vegas, Teterboro, Orlando, Houston and Phoenix.

Friday’s ground stop is only the third such nationwide moratorium on flights in recent history. The F.A.A. issued nationwide ground stops previously on Sept. 11, 2001, in the wake of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York, and on Jan. 11, 2023, due to an outage in the F.A.A.’s system to alert pilots to safety issues.

I'm sure it's only a coincidence that Microsoft's entire communications platform went down yesterday...

Here's what Chicago's airspace looks like right now:

Ordinarily there would be several dozen airplanes taking off from and landing at O'Hare and Midway. The only things up in the sky right now are general aviation aircraft who don't require ATC services.

It would be nice if the administration had competent people, but that would be really out of character for them.