Yesterday the FAA had to ground all air traffic for only the second time since 9/11. Apparently, the reality TV guy who serves as transportation secretary and the former plumber with no college degree who is in charge of homeland security ordered the installation some kind of AI technology that quickly ended up “overwhelming the older system.” At least that was the explanation given by Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin.
Trump administration officials said Friday that new technology being added to the nation’s air traffic control system overloaded antiquated parts of it and caused “intermittent” communications and radar gaps, leading to the longest nationwide ground stop in 25 years.
It was lifted in the evening after a five-hour stretch when most flights were not allowed to take off from airports in the U.S.
Thousands of flights and potentially over a million travelers were affected. Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin told reporters at the White House that no one was in any danger as more than 3,000 flights were safely landed. But Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said he could not guarantee it wouldn’t happen again.
Mullin said the FAA was installing “new equipment, new technology” and “it was overwhelming the older system.” There appeared to be no indication of a cyberattack, he said.
A limited number of domestic flights began departing late Friday after the ground stop was lifted, but it will likely take days for airlines to fully recover because so many planes and crews were out of position. Officials said they think the system will be back to normal in time to handle the Thanksgiving travel rush.
The nationwide ground stop was the first since January 2023, when another key FAA computer system that sends notices to pilots malfunctioned, and the second since the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Gina Lollobrigida
Mullin said there was no sign that the technology problems were caused by a “nefarious act.”
Asked whether he could rule out a cyberattack or rogue artificial intelligence incident, Mullin said there are no “footprints” showing an attack and that the problem appears to be “mechanically driven.” He said officials were still looking for the cause.
At least 827 flights had been diverted. By 7:05 p.m. EST, 670 flights were sent back to the airport from where they originally took off, while 157 were redirected to a different airport, according to Cirium, an aviation analytics company.
Duffy was defensive, blaming Congress for failing to approve more funding for new technology, while downplaying the fact that trying to implement new fixes overtaxed the system. He implored lawmakers to act.
This morning, CNN reported that Duffy is now blaming “contractor error.” Frankly, it sounds like he doesn’t really have a clue.
• What went wrong: Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said it’s still unclear if aging equipment or contractor error was at the root of telecommunication outages that forced a rare nationwide ground stop. Duffy has criticized a key contractor, L3Harris, and blamed dated air traffic control technology, but the Trump administration has not yet provided a clear explanation for how yesterday’s airspace meltdown unfolded.
• Travel misery: Thousands of travelers face lingering delays and cancellations today. Here’s a look at some of the most affected airports, and what to do if your flight is impacted.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy escalated his calls for for tens of billions of dollars from Congress to upgrade the nation’s rickety air traffic system — a plea that came Friday night after an hourslong, nationwide halt to aviation sparked passenger disruptions around the country.
Duffy had been seeking $30 billion from Congress to upgrade the system. On Friday he upped that ask to $50 billion.
Peter O’Toole
The ground stop, which was ordered in the late afternoon, rippled across the country, disrupting flights at airports nationwide and leaving airlines facing a backlog of delays as they worked to get operations back on schedule.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said Friday that there was “zero evidence” that the grounding of passenger planes was due to a cyberattack or artificial intelligence incursion, though he said “we’re still looking” at the possibility. Instead, Duffy said that facilities that route flights began to experience “instability” in radar data and communications with aircraft, leading to inconsistent information between pilots and controllers.
Duffy blamed the “legacy” air traffic system without providing many specifics, all the while beseeching Congress for more money.
“I’ve asked — the president’s asked — for $30 billion. I want $50 billion,” he said. “What’s more important than having an air traffic control system that actually works? … I want Congress to give us emergency funding. This is bipartisan. This is American. I want $50 billion.”
Prior to Friday’s ground stop, Congress had been lukewarm to granting additional funding. The FAA received $12.5 billion in last year’s GOP megalaw to jump-start its air traffic control overhaul.
While Duffy tries to blame the old contractor L3Harris, it turns out that the new contractor, Air Space Intelligence, donated to Duffy’s son-in-law’s campaign for a Wisconsin House seat.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy blamed a “legacy provider” for Friday’s widespread ground stop that impacted more than 1 million travelers across the country.
Duffy blamed telecom provider L3Harris for the outage, though he admitted the Department of Transportation is continuing its root-cause analysis. He claimed that the contractor was updating a router at a remote location that injected instability into the system.
Clara Bow
“This is L3Harris,” Duffy said. “It’s our legacy telecom network. It’s owned by L3Harris. With our new architecture, with the money that we’re requesting, we will work with the greatest telecom companies in the world, which will be AT&T, Verizon, and Lumen. They’re all working with us on the new architecture. But in the meantime, until I can build that, I’m stuck with L3Harris, which owns this network.”
Speculation swirled on Friday that the DOT’s new SMART weather system could have caused the outage. The company that installed that system, Air Space Intelligence, had previously donated to Duffy’s son-in-law’s political campaign.
Duffy speaks about what happened ahead of the mass grounding yesterday, reiterating that the US has “an incredibly old telecommunications system”.
He explains that maintenance was being carried out to switch from copper wire to fibre by a contractor called L3Harris – a technology provider company.
“It was such an old wire that it was being discontinued,” he says, adding this work has been going on over many years.
Duffy goes on to say that the government is trying to find out whether the problem was caused by “incompetence” on the part of L3Harris, or by a faulty piece of equipment.
The router that was being worked on started flooding other air traffic control systems, he says, which created communication issues with planes that led the government to shut down the airspace for safety reasons.
This is a clown show. I just hope there won’t be any plane crashes.
The Nvidia spy scandal is still in the news, despite Jensen Huang resigning as CEO.
Jensen Huang’s resignation from Nvidia after reports of an affair with an alleged Chinese spy is being treated as a one-off scandal. But it’s not. In the past year, my private security firm, which is staffed largely by former intelligence and law enforcement officers, has handled a number of cases in which senior executives at U.S. technology companies had relationships with women who we came to believe were working for Chinese intelligence.
The artificial intelligence industry has a security problem that it does not yet fully understand. U.S. companies are building technology with massive commercial and national security value, but their defenses against foreign intelligence are, in most cases, nowhere near good enough. At the same time, the FBI counterintelligence squads that should help protect these companies are badly understaffed; some agents have been reassigned to focus on the administration’s(opens in new tab) political priorities, while others have been purged(opens in new tab). The result is a widening gap between how much the technology matters and how well it’s being protected.
Jerry Seinfeld
The FBI’s counterintelligence posture is an important part of this picture. NPR(opens in new tab)reported in October(opens in new tab) that in many of the bureau’s 56 field offices, counterintelligence squads are only 50%-60% staffed, as agents and analysts have been shifted toward fighting violent crime and enforcing immigration laws. The FBI disputes that this has weakened its counterintelligence operation. But it’s hard to believe these kinds of cuts haven’t affected China-focused efforts — and they come at a time when U.S. AI and AI-adjacent firms are more at risk from foreign interference than ever.
Investigating crime is important, but moving experienced personnel away from counterintelligence is a dangerous trade. Counterintelligence investigations are exceedingly complex and depend on accumulated knowledge and specialized judgment built over decades. That expertise is easy to lose and slow to rebuild. The history of intelligence shows that political purges take years to recover from.
After 9/11, for example, the FBI redirected large numbers of agents away from white-collar crime to counterterrorism. By the time the 2008 financial crisis hit, the bureau had fewer people to investigate mortgage and securities fraud — one reason so few of the people responsible ever faced charges.
Read the rest at the link. I have zero faith that Trump and his goons will be able to deal with this. Trump doesn’t seem to care at all about China’s spying.
Headquartered in a curved glass skyscraper that boasts commanding views over Singapore’s Marina Bay district, Megaspeed International is just the type of fast-growing tech start-up that Asia’s wealthy city-state has been keen to attract.
In three years, the corporate entity has gone from an inactive Chinese gaming subsidiary to one of Asia’s biggest buyers of cutting-edge semiconductors from the US.
But its rapid rise has also propelled it to the center of an alleged spy scandal that’s now engulfing Nvidia, the $4 trillion company behind the world’s most advanced chips.
At the same time, suspicions that Megaspeed may be exploiting a loophole in US export controls is exacerbating a rift within the US government on how to best keep China from accessing its most sensitive technologies.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang resigned on Thursday after admitting to having an affair. Congress has also called on him to testify behind closed doors about his romantic relationship with Alice Huang, no relation, whom US officials believe to be a Chinese intelligence asset. Beijing has said the claim is a “groundless” attempt to smear China.
Also known as Huang Le, the 43-year-old Chinese executive played an integral role in establishing Megaspeed, according to corporate documents and media reports. CNN has made continued efforts to reach her for comment.
Elizabeth Taylor
But as Megaspeed quietly instilled billions of dollars of Nvidia chips in data centers across Southeast Asia, it came under the scrutiny of the Singaporean government, as well as US officials concerned that the company was passing those chips on to unauthorized Chinese buyers.
“Chips are the absolute ground-zero of all other technology,” said Alex Capri, a senior lecturer in the business school at the National University of Singapore. “The appetite for Nvidia’s chips in China is absolutely insatiable… Nvidia chips are still far and away the best.”
But US export controls have fettered Chinese access to its most advanced semiconductor technology, spawning a shadow industry of complex transactions, shell companies and chip smuggling – of which Megaspeed is now under suspicion by US authorities and lawmakers of helping enable.
In late September, Cantor Fitzgerald hosted Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and other top executives from the chipmaker for investor meetings in New York, according to a Cantor research report reviewed by CNBC.
The Wall Street firm liked what it heard.
“We continue to view NVDA as the best risk/reward in our coverage,” Cantor analyst C.J. Muse and his colleagues wrote in a research report dated Oct. 3 that maintained a $350 price target and overweight rating on the stock.
Yet the firm, formerly run by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and now led by his sons, Brandon and Kyle, reported a nearly 50% decline in the number of Nvidia shares it held between September 2025 and March 2026, according to a CNBC analysis of securities filings that excludes options. Nvidia had been one of the largest stock positions reported in Cantor’s filings.
The decline coincided with White House and U.S. intelligence officials pressing Lutnick to crack down on Megaspeed, a Singapore-based company suspected of funneling Nvidia’s advanced artificial intelligence chips to China. Lutnick repeatedly resisted those efforts, Axios reported Nov. 11.
By the time Cantor hosted Huang in New York, Lutnick had also received a classified intelligence warning, according to a Nov. 10 Axios report, about Huang’s ties to a suspected Chinese spy and had appeared alongside the CEO at a G20 technology summit in North Carolina.
Even as Cantor pared back its Nvidia stake, it continued doing business across the chipmaker’s AI empire. A CNBC review of securities filings, corporate announcements and Wall Street research found the firm has helped arrange billions of dollars in financing for Nvidia’s business partners while maintaining close ties to the chipmaker’s leadership.
Those ties have drawn fresh scrutiny following Huang’s resignation Thursday and Axios’ reporting that Lutnick repeatedly resisted a crackdown on companies suspected of smuggling Nvidia chips to China, despite President Donald Trump authorizing new export restrictions on those companies for a third time on Nov. 5.
Read more at CNBC.
Former National Security Council member Chris McGuire at The New York Times (gift link): Howard Lutnick Has Got to Go.
Jensen Huang, until Thursday the head of Nvidia, one of the world’s most valuable corporations, abruptly resigned his post following his admission of an extramarital affair with an alleged Chinese spy. Now an even bigger scandal is developing at the Department of Commerce, whose secretary, Howard Lutnick, bears almost as much responsibility for this brewing crisis as Mr. Huang.
Rutger Hauer
Nvidia dominates the market for chips needed to drive artificial intelligence. Its cutting-edge chips have been deemed so critical to our national security that they cannot be sold to Chinese companies. Clearly,
Mr. Huang demonstrated terrible judgment in being intimate with a woman who is not only suspected of working for China’s intelligence apparatus but whose firm is believed to be diverting banned Nvidia chips to China. But it was Mr. Lutnick who made the decision not to enforce export controls designed to counter chip smuggling, making Mr. Huang a potential target. (China has rejected the espionage claims.)
It is largely Mr. Lutnick’s fault that Megaspeed, the company that employed the alleged spy, successfully smuggled a reported $7 billion of Nvidia chips into China (a number that no doubt represents the tip of the iceberg). His actions created the conditions for this crisis to occur, conditions that have allowed China to remain competitive with the United States in the race for A.I. supremacy.
Mr. Lutnick must resign his post so the cleanup can commence.
In January 2025, the Biden administration imposed new export controls expressly to combat Chinese chip smuggling. These controls required unvetted companies in most countries to receive an export license from the Commerce Department before making any large A.I. chip purchase. Mr. Lutnick, who took his post the following month, never allowed these controls to go into effect. Mr. Huang was already building what would become a close relationship with the new president and Mr. Lutnick, and Nvidia long maintained that there was “no evidence” that restricted chips were being diverted to China. In May of that year, the Commerce Department announced that it would not enforce the controls, saying it would eventually replace them with other anti-smuggling measures.
The department never published a replacement rule. It didn’t even bother to officially rescind the Biden administration’s controls. Instead, Mr. Lutnick effectively outsourced the job of vetting whether a given company posed a risk of diversion to China to the private sector, for example to Nvidia and to A.I. server suppliers such as Supermicro.
The consequences of his decision have been catastrophic. Chip smuggling is running rampant. Taiwanese customs data shows that from 2025 to 2026, over $60 billion worth of A.I. chips were most likely shipped to Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, making these three relatively small countries among the largest importers of A.I. chips in the world.
Trump has a meeting scheduled with both Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin. What could possibly go wrong? Well, Trump has already said he won’t confront Xi about the Nvidia spy scandal and he will not bring up Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are planning to meet on the sidelines of a summit in China next week, the White House has said.
The historic meeting between the respective leaders of the US, Russia and China will take place as Trump attends the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (Apec) summit in the southern city of Shenzhen, spokeswoman Olivia Wales told reporters.
John Oliver
“The president has made it clear that, among other topics, he will discuss the reduction of nuclear weapons in the world, whose proliferation President Trump believes is very dangerous,” she said.
It is understood Iran may also be discussed during the meeting of the world’s biggest nuclear powers, but not Ukraine. Russia has confirmed the meeting. China has yet to react.
No agreement was expected to follow the talks, an unnamed, senior US official said, according to news agencies AP and Reuters.
Trump will arrive in Shenzhen late on Wednesday for the two-day summit between the 21 member states. He will also take part in bilateral talks with Xi on Thursday – their fourth meeting since the US president returned to office in 2025.
“President Trump will conclude his visit to China with a trilateral meeting between the president of the United States, the president of the People’s Republic of China, and the president of the Russian Federation,” Wales said.
US President Donald Trump, China’s President Xi Jinping and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin will hold their first trilateral meeting on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in China’s Shenzhen, the White House has confirmed….
Talks will focus on nuclear proliferation, the White House said. But they come amid significant global turbulence: Russia’s war in Ukraine, the US-Israeli war on Iran and ongoing trade tensions between Washington and Beijing.
“I think what we’ll see is some pretty impressive photo-ops with a lot of really bombastic rhetoric from Trump,” Simon Mabon, a professor of international politics at the UK’s Lancaster University, told Al Jazeera. However, he added, the three “collectively or unilaterally, are not able to bring about an end to the conflict in Iran or Ukraine”.
So what does each side want and what will be the likely outcome? [….]
A top issue for Russia and the US is the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), which lapsed in February. The treaty was first signed in 2010 and caps US and Russian strategic nuclear arsenals.
Russia currently possesses the largest number of warheads, followed by the US and then China, which is rapidly building up its own arsenal.
Trump previously rejected Russia’s proposal to extend the treaty after it expired, demanding instead a “new, improved and modernised” deal that includes Beijing.
China is understood, however, to be reluctant to join an agreement it was not involved in forming.
A senior Trump administration official told Reuters this topic will start the conversation but that “we do not expect to get any kind of agreement”.
The United States floated the idea of Ukraine ceding the eastern Donbas region to Russia in exchange for NATO membership during recent talks, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has said.
David Bowie
Zelensky told journalists that US negotiators had put the question and that it was the “first time” such a proposal has been raised. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has long coveted the region, while he has cited possible NATO membership for Ukraine as a reason for launching his full-scale invasion in 2022.
Much of the Donbas is controlled by Russia, although Moscow’s grinding ground offensive in the region has largely stalled.
“The Americans raised a question: ‘What if Ukraine joins NATO? Would Ukraine withdraw from Donbas?’ This was the first time this had been raised,” said Zelensky.
He stressed that Ukraine would not give up territory but said if he received a “comprehensive security package” – which would include a strong Ukrainian army and guarantees from NATO and the European Union – he would put a proposal to the public.
“If the American side confirms precisely this to us, together with other NATO partners, then I will ask our Ukrainian society what it thinks: do we accept it or not? I have no right to make that decision on my own. But we need specifics, and we don’t have them yet.”
US-brokered peace talks between Ukraine and Russia took place in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday and Wednesday. The trilateral discussions were mediated by Trump administration envoys – US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff – and marked the first talks involving both parties in months, although they ended without a breakthrough.
Those are the top stories today. There’s a lot happening. What do you think? What else is on your mind?
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This FAA stuff is just really suspicious. All those planes, and then we have a Tanker crash into the old riverboat on the Mississippi? WTF is going on with the system that sends all our transportation information to these systems? We need investigations!
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