U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin: AI cannot be ruled out in the nationwide flight ground stop
U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said at the White House on November 13, 2026, that when investigating the cause of the FAA’s nationwide ground stop, no possibility could currently be ruled out, including AI-related issues.
When asked whether the malfunction was related to AI, Mullin said that no possibility could be ruled out. He also stressed that there was currently no indication that this was a malicious attack, that the incident was a telecommunications outage, that all flights had been accounted for and aircraft in the air could land safely, and that this was not another 9/11.
On that day, the FAA issued a nationwide ground stop order for airports across the United States because of a communications problem affecting air traffic control centers along all routes, prohibiting takeoffs until further notice. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy confirmed that technicians were investigating. Preliminary law enforcement information indicated it was not a cyberattack.
Original sources:
Title: FAA Orders "Extraordinary" Nationwide Ground Stop Of All U.S. Flights
Publisher: Deadline
Publication date: 2026-11-13
URL: deadline.com/2026/11/faa-ground-stop-u-s-flights-tv-coverage-1237223362
Source type: media report
Verification status: full text actually read for this report, verification date 2026-11-13
Supporting content: Mullin’s original remarks that no possibility could be ruled out, including AI; the description of a telecommunications outage; the FAA nationwide ground stop order; and Duffy’s statement
ABAB AI Insight
Markwayne Mullin took office as Secretary of Homeland Security in 2025. In this incident, he characterized the FAA communications failure as a telecommunications outage while making clear that AI-related factors were not ruled out during the investigation. A global Microsoft 365 technical outage occurred the day before, affecting Outlook and Teams, but Mullin had publicly denied any connection between the two.
The U.S. air traffic control system has long relied on dedicated telecommunications and radar frequencies rather than commercial cloud platforms. The FAA is advancing modernization, including the introduction of AI-assisted tools such as the SMART system for route suggestions, but controllers retain final authority, and the system does not directly control radio links. In January 2023, a deletion error in the NOTAM database triggered a similar nationwide ground stop; the cause was human error rather than an external attack.
Compared with the 2023 incident, this case also involved a nationwide ground stop caused by a single communications vulnerability, but officials have so far only confirmed a telecommunications outage, with the root cause still undetermined. Mullin’s inclusion of AI in the list of possibilities preserves a technical possibility during the investigation window rather than establishing causation.
This framing keeps the investigation focused on the FAA’s internal systems, including possibly newly deployed tools, rather than external cloud service providers. If a link to AI-assisted tools is later confirmed, it will directly test how well the separation between “suggestion authority” and “control authority” works in practice within the modernization of air traffic control, and may affect the pace of future funding and deployment.
ABAB News · Cognitive Law
Saying that AI is not ruled out at the investigation stage does not mean AI has been confirmed as the cause of the malfunction.
A nationwide ground stop defaults to safety first; officials first rule out threats before identifying technical causes.
Dedicated telecommunications systems and AI-assisted tools coexist, and fault attribution requires a root-cause report to determine.