Microsoft Denies Role in US Flight Ground Stop
Microsoft has denied any connection between its global services outage and a nationwide aviation disruption in the United States that caused more than 10,000 flight delays and 6,600 cancellations on Friday, November 13. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) suspended departures after telecommunications failures affected air traffic control centres across the country.
FAA Network Failure Disrupts Thousands of US Flights
The FAA ordered a nationwide ground stop after communication and radar systems experienced disruptions across its 22 regional air traffic control centres.
The problems began around 3:36 pm Eastern Time, with the ground stop lifted at approximately 8:15 pm.
US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy attributed the disruption to overloaded switches and routers operating on ageing infrastructure, including telecommunications equipment dating back to the 1980s.
Aviation data firm Cirium estimated that approximately 1.5 million passengers were affected.
Microsoft Says Global Outage Was Unrelated
The aviation disruption followed a separate Microsoft 365 outage affecting Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other services across 74 countries.
Microsoft maintained that its technical problems were unrelated to the FAA incident.
The company attributed its outage to a network configuration issue involving an earlier capacity upgrade.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin also dismissed suggestions of a connection and said investigators had found no evidence of a cyberattack.
FAA Seeks $50 Billion for Air Traffic Modernisation
The FAA’s disruption reportedly followed an update to its private telecommunications network operated by defence contractor L3Harris.
Officials also ruled out the recently introduced SMART artificial intelligence traffic-planning system as the cause.
Duffy has requested $50 billion in emergency congressional funding to modernise America’s ageing air traffic control infrastructure, up from an earlier proposal of $30 billion.
Authorities continue examining the technical failure while airlines work to restore normal schedules.
