The FAA grounded all commercial flights until 8:15 p.m. Friday due to violations in the air traffic control system. Transportation Secretary Sean Diffie explained that the FAA's old analog switches, routers and copper wire systems of the 1980s, especially the time-division (TDM) lines used to transmit voice and radar information, were bursting with data. Homeland Security Secretary Marquin Mullin noted that the failure occurred as the FAA implemented new technology and fixes to the system. Just three days earlier, the FAA had activated a new air management tool called Smart at all 22 regional air traffic control centers, and the surge of data from the new equipment overwhelmed the legacy hardware. Just a day earlier, Microsoft Outlook experienced a global surge. The Microsoft Outlook Outage was a global service disruption that lasted more than 24 hours that began around 12:00 p.m. on Thursday, November 12, 2026, after a faulty internal network affected the servers managed by Exchange Online. Because Exchange Online acts as a central back-end for Microsoft's work software, the failure knocked out email, calendaring and connected applications for millions of businesses, government agencies and individuals in more than 70 countries. According to Microsoft's official explanation, the failure was introduced by a configuration bug during a previous network capability upgrade that was triggered when engineers pushed a routine network change on Thursday. Microsoft specifically prohibited a cyber attack or any involvement of AI agents. The terms: americanmajority.