Updated Nov. 13, 2026, 5:45 p.m. ET: This story has been updated with new information, including Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin's comments that DHS is examining the FAA's AI rollout and Bloomberg's report on the FBI's inquiry. The headline has been changed to reflect these developments.

Federal officials are now examining whether the FAA's new AI air traffic tool played a role in Friday's nationwide ground stop. Reporters at the White House asked Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin about the AI system the FAA had just expanded nationwide. "We're looking at that," he said, adding that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is part of the review, The Well News reports. It's the first time an official has said on the record that the AI angle is under examination.

Mullin didn't go further than that. He called the problem a telecommunications outage and said there was no indication of a nefarious attack, according to ABC7. He also said he wouldn't rule out any cause, CNN reports. Separately, Bloomberg reports that the FBI doesn't believe the outage was a cyberattack or criminal, and that one area of inquiry is whether a software update caused it. That comes from a single person familiar with the matter, and the report doesn't mention SMART.

None of this shows that SMART caused the outage, and no official has said it did. What has changed is who's asking. A few hours ago it was analysts on cable news. Now it's the agencies running the investigation.

The FAA stopped every departing flight in the country on Friday afternoon. The order took effect at 3:54 p.m. Eastern, according to the Air Traffic Control System Command Center, "due to extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety," Gizmodo reports. Planes already in the air can land. Inbound international flights are being handled one at a time, per CBS News.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy posted on X that the stop followed a communication issue hitting all of the FAA's Air Route Traffic Control Centers, the 22 regional facilities that handle high-altitude traffic across the country. FAA technicians are investigating. The agency's own statement, quoted by Axios, said "multiple" centers were affected. A later FAA update shared by Reuters aviation correspondent David Shepardson described a technical problem with telecommunications at many air traffic control facilities, Clash Report notes. The FAA's status board lists the reason as equipment outage, according to View from the Wing. The ground stop was still in place early Friday evening, and the FAA hadn't said when departures would resume.

This almost never happens. The last nationwide ground stop was in January 2023, when the system that sends safety notices to pilots went down, and the one before that followed the September 11 attacks, CNN reports. The 2023 outage was eventually traced to a file that had been accidentally deleted in a decades-old system.

SMART went national on Tuesday

Which brings us to SMART. On Thursday, Ars Technica reported that the FAA is now using its new AI tool to manage traffic across the entire national airspace. The agency had told FLYING on Tuesday that SMART was active in the airspace of all 22 of those same centers.

SMART stands for Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories. Air Space Intelligence is building it under a 12-year, $875 million contract awarded in June, the Washington Times reports. It pulls in about 200 data streams, including flight paths, schedules, weather, airport capacity and controller staffing, and tries to spot congestion hours, days or weeks before it hits. It went live September 21 at Reagan National, Dulles and BWI. The FAA says it has rerouted 180 flights since then, saving an average of 10 minutes and about 80 gallons of fuel on each. Ars put that fuel savings at roughly $345 a flight.

The FAA's position is that SMART advises and doesn't control anything. A team in Washington reviews each recommendation before it goes to a facility, and controllers can accept or reject it. "SMART cannot be used to replace the critical role air traffic controllers play or take over control of an aircraft," the agency said, per Newsweek.

Airlines signed on, controllers were left out

Airline executives like it. Ars noted that American Airlines CEO Robert Isom has praised SMART, and Delta has backed it too. Airlines for America President and CEO Chris Sununu said the program is "finally making sure we will have the best flight management tools," in remarks published by the Transportation Department. The support wasn't unconditional. Before launch, Politico reported that carriers still couldn't get basic answers about the tool after roughly three months of near-weekly meetings with the FAA.

The people who work next to SMART every day weren't part of building it. The National Air Traffic Controllers Association told FLYING in September that it had not been "involved in the design, testing, or implementation of SMART," a statement NPR also carried. In October, 25 members of Congress asked the FAA to suspend the system over testing, training and oversight concerns, Aerospace Global News reported. Rep. Don Beyer of Virginia said airlines had been "privately panicking" over the rollout, per Newsweek and Common Dreams. House Democrats separately asked the Government Accountability Office to review the program and warned that the AI could hallucinate safety-critical information, according to Gizmodo's summary of FedScoop's reporting.

Now officials are asking too

The FAA and Duffy still haven't connected SMART to Friday's outage, the Washington Times points out. Before Mullin spoke, the timing had already caught the attention of CNN aviation analyst Mary Schiavo, a former Transportation Department inspector general. On air Friday, she noted that the FAA had just taken SMART nationwide and said new computer systems have often had trouble working with older ones, according to the Times of Israel liveblog. She pointed toward a technical failure rather than an attack, which is where the FBI's reported thinking now points as well.

There's still good reason to hold back. On September 21, the day SMART launched, ground stops hit Newark, Philadelphia and much of the Northeast. Some outlets linked the two, and Glitchwire later said it had been wrong to. Duffy said an Amtrak construction crew had cut a fiber line in New Jersey, NBC10 Philadelphia reported. Friday's failure is also being described as a telecommunications problem. SMART runs from one location near Washington and sends recommendations to the centers, 6abc notes, and people check its advice before anyone acts on it. The Bloomberg report doesn't say which software update the FBI is looking at. It may turn out to have nothing to do with SMART.

It hasn't been ruled out, though, and now DHS is formally checking. The FAA itself still hasn't said a word about SMART.

Our take

That silence is the part enterprise leaders should sit with. Whatever broke on Friday, this is the first time the U.S. has put AI into critical public infrastructure at national scale and then watched that infrastructure fail around it. The national airspace runs on layers of technology, some of it decades old, kept running by controllers and technicians who know its quirks. SMART went from three airports to all 22 centers in about seven weeks. Airlines cheered, lawmakers objected, and the controllers' union says it was never in the room.

When a system like that goes down, investigators have to rule things out fast. They can do that much more easily if the people who run the old system helped plug in the new one and know exactly what it touches. Without that, every outage after a rollout raises the same question, and somebody has to spend hours answering it.

Plenty of companies are doing their own version of this right now, wiring AI agents and copilots into old ERPs, ticket queues and call centers, often on a tight timeline and without the frontline people who know where the old systems are fragile. If one of those systems went down tomorrow, could you say within the hour whether your AI was involved? If the answer is no, you'd rather find that out now than in the middle of an outage.

So what's your plan when the new system meets the old one?

We'll update this story when the FAA names a cause.