DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin: Sees no reason to link the FAA nationwide ground stop with the Microsoft outage
U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told reporters at the White House on November 13, 2026, that he saw no reason to link the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) nationwide ground stop with the Microsoft outage from the previous day, and called them “separate issues.”
That day, the FAA issued a nationwide ground stop for airports across the United States due to “extraordinary circumstances and safety reasons,” requiring all departing flights to remain grounded until further notice; arriving flights were allowed to land, and inbound international flights were handled on a case-by-case basis. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy confirmed on X that the ground stop was caused by a communications problem affecting air traffic control centers along all routes, and FAA technicians were investigating.
Mullin described the incident as a “telecommunications outage,” stressing that there was currently no sign of a malicious attack and that “this is not another 9/11”; all flights had been accounted for, and the public did not need to worry about the safety of their loved ones. Preliminary law enforcement information indicated it was not a cyberattack.
Original source:
Title: Mullin Sees No Link Between FAA Ground Stop and Microsoft Outage
Publisher: Clash Report
Date of publication: 2026-11-13
URL: clashreport.com/world/articles/faa-orders-nationwide-ground-stop-citing-extraordinary-circumstances-rj94ktbb7uf
Source nature: media report
Verification status: Full text actually read for this report; verification date 2026-11-13
Supporting content: Mullin’s original words about seeing no reason to link it to the Microsoft outage, the FAA nationwide ground stop order, Duffy’s statement about a communications problem, and the “telecommunications outage” description
ABAB AI Insight
Markwayne Mullin was sworn in as Secretary of Homeland Security in 2025, having previously served as a U.S. senator from Oklahoma. In this incident, he clearly distinguished the FAA communications failure from Microsoft 365’s (Outlook, Teams, etc.) global technical outage the previous day. Microsoft said the outage stemmed from a technical issue during a network capacity upgrade, with no evidence of malicious activity, and it lasted about 18–20 hours, affecting businesses and governments worldwide.
FAA nationwide ground stops are extremely rare. The most recent prior one was the approximately 1.5–2 hour ground stop on January 11, 2023, caused by database file corruption in the NOTAM system (a contractor mistakenly deleted files), which led to more than 10,000 flight delays; before that, it was the full ground stop after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. In this case, both Mullin and Duffy pointed to a telecommunications/communications problem rather than a shared software-platform failure.
Compared with the 2023 NOTAM incident, both were triggered by the vulnerability of a single system, but 2023 was clearly a database operation error, while this case is currently only confirmed as a communications outage, with the root cause under investigation. The Microsoft outage affected cloud-based office services, while FAA air traffic control relies on dedicated telecommunications and radar frequencies, with an independent system architecture.
This incident highlights the U.S. air traffic control system’s dependence on dedicated communications infrastructure. Mullin ruled out a direct link to a commercial cloud outage and focused attention on an internal FAA telecommunications issue, which may accelerate existing funding needs for air traffic control modernization (Congress has already approved $12.5 billion, and an additional $30.1 billion has been requested), rather than shifting responsibility to a single technology supplier.
ABAB News · Cognitive Law
Two major outages on the same day do not mean the same root cause: dedicated telecommunications systems and cloud office platforms can fail in parallel.
A nationwide ground stop is a safety default, not a signal of a confirmed attack.
Before the root-cause investigation is complete, official statements that these are “separate issues” limit cross-sector attribution of responsibility.