Friday’s nationwide flight grounding may be just a preview, according to a new warning from The Atlantic.
Hours after the FAA halted every domestic departure in the United States, staff writer Josh Tyrangiel wrote that the cybersecurity experts he’s been talking to expect much more of the same.
“The Next Major Grounding Will Be Worse,” the headline warned.
Tyrangiel, a former editor of Bloomberg Businessweek, said that just two days earlier he had told podcaster Pablo Torre what his sources believe is coming. They think fast-improving AI, open-source models and “the rickety state of the world’s software” will lead to “something like rolling waves of chaos.”
“There’s going to be stuff that doesn’t work that disrupts your daily lives—and that’s the best you can hope for,” he recalled saying.
“Call me Dumb Nostradamus,” Tyrangiel wrote. His own flight landed minutes before the grounding.
He stressed that he doesn’t know what caused Friday’s ground stop. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy blamed a communications issue that interfered with air traffic control.
Tyrangiel noted that the stop came soon after the FAA rolled out SMART, an $875 million AI-enhanced air traffic management system. Its maker, Air Space Intelligence, denies that its technology was at fault. The grounding also followed a Microsoft Outlook outage the day before.
“That’s a lot of cyber smoke in two days,” the analyst wrote.
His sources gave him two big reasons to worry. The first is that AI may give “state-grade capability” to people with nothing to lose.
“You can’t deter a vandal,” Tyrangiel wrote. “You don’t know who he is, and he doesn’t care, and he may currently be eating cereal in a gaming chair. The kids who used to grab a bat and swing at mailboxes can now grab some compute and turn off a town’s refrigerators.”
The second is that when defenders find a hole they can’t patch fast enough, they shut the system down. The experts expect “the next 18 months are going to be a hassle, with regular disruptions to services that we rely on.”
Halting every departure in the country “isn’t a sign that the system is failing,” Tyrangiel wrote. “More and more, it is the system.”
His most chilling passage, which CNN veteran Brian Stelter shared on X, warned that Americans are losing something they’ve long taken for granted.
“Most of us have been privileged to live in a world of peace, prosperity, and, above all, stability. We’ve gone to bed without having to wonder whether the traffic lights will work tomorrow,” he wrote. “Now, if my sources are correct, we should plan to wake up in Software Beirut, where nothing is broken all the time, but anything might break at any time, and the main skill you need is not being surprised.”
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