By the Founders, Department of Technology | San Diego, California | November 14, 2026
On Friday, November 13, 2026, the FAA grounded flights at every U.S. airport for more than four hours. A future Department of Technology (DoT) would not have run air traffic control, but we believe its structure would have made this failure less likely and the response faster and clearer. This post explains how, and where our proposal has limits. A follow-up post looks at the $50 billion funding request that came next.
The cause has not been confirmed, and the story is still developing. We rely on published reports and make clear where officials disagree.
What we know so far
The FAA said it issued a nationwide ground stop for all U.S. airports after communication issues affected multiple Air Route Traffic Control Centers. According to reporting from NBC News, instability was detected at 3:36 p.m. Eastern, the stop was issued at 3:54 p.m. and lifted at 8:15 p.m., and more than 7,000 flights were canceled. ABC News reported it was only the second nationwide ground stop since 9/11.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy blamed old equipment. NPR quoted him saying, “We have old switches, old routers,” and that the system “got overloaded.” He also said the FAA never lost all radar or communications, and that the stop was a precaution.
What we do not know
Officials have not given one consistent explanation. CNN reported that Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin pointed instead to FAA updates added to the old system. Al Jazeera reported that investigators were examining whether a software update played a role. NPR noted that Duffy did not have a ready answer for why the systems became overwhelmed on an otherwise normal day, and that FAA leaders did not brief reporters. Some air traffic controllers also told reporters they do not accept the explanation, according to CNN.
We do not claim to know which account is right, and the rest of this post does not depend on it.
This was not a surprise
Aging air traffic control technology has been a known problem for years. In January 2023, a failed FAA computer system led to a national ground stop. In 2025, repeated telecommunications failures hit Newark, and Duffy said at the time that “we could see other situations like this around the country because the system is old.” Those problems have spanned administrations of both parties. A known weakness that stays unfixed across years is a structural problem, not only a bad day, and a structural problem calls for a structural answer.
How a Department of Technology would help
Our federal framework is a conceptual design, and a DoT would work alongside agencies like the FAA rather than replace them. We see six places where it would have made a difference: four that work before a failure, one during it, and one after.
1. Making the risk visible before a crisis
The framework calls for a Technology Oversight Committee that audits operations and reports to Congress, plus regular public reporting. An audit of legacy network equipment across federal agencies would put a known weakness on the record, with a name attached and a deadline, long before it fails.
2. Putting network expertise at the top
The official explanation was “old switches, old routers.” Those are the exact tools network engineers work with every day. As we argue in Back to Basics, a leader with hands-on enterprise network experience can judge whether an upgrade plan is sound and whether a vendor’s promise is realistic, which is much harder for someone who has never run a production network. The same logic applies to the network layer that air traffic control depends on, which we examine in our follow-up.
3. Testing changes before they go live
If the outage did follow an update, as Mullin suggested, the lesson is about change management. Our framework already requires impact assessments for major technology initiatives. We would go further, with staged rollouts and tested rollback plans for critical systems. That last part is our suggestion and goes beyond the written framework.
4. Planning for failure
Grounding flights as a precaution was reasonable, and we are not second-guessing it. The goal is to shrink the time between failure and recovery through redundancy, monitoring, and rehearsed recovery plans. This is the thinking behind our work on continuity of government. Which layer of the system deserves that attention first is the question our follow-up takes up.
5. Coordinating across agencies
The framework says cross-agency technology initiatives should be coordinated through the DoT, and it creates a National Technology Security Council for sharing threat information. In the first hours of an outage, the public wants to know whether it is an attack. Shared incident protocols help officials answer that question quickly and consistently.
6. Telling the public what happened
Today, the public is hearing competing explanations. We would require a public post-incident report that explains what failed, why, and what will change. That fits our commitment to transparency and public reporting.
The limits of our proposal
A Department of Technology would not run air traffic control, and it could not replace aging equipment overnight. Modernization costs real money and takes years. We also cannot promise that it would have prevented this outage, since the cause is not yet known.
Our claim is narrower: with accountable leaders, hands-on expertise, independent audits, and public reporting, a failure like this becomes less likely, and the response becomes faster and more transparent.
Questions for officials and candidates
Whatever the cause turns out to be, these four questions are worth asking:
- Which critical systems in your agency still depend on legacy network equipment, and what is the replacement schedule?
- Who is personally accountable for the reliability of those systems?
- How are major upgrades tested, and how quickly can you roll one back?
- Will you commit to a public report after every major outage?
Our follow-up adds three more, about how the $50 billion request would be spent.
The bottom line
The ground stop was a warning, not just an inconvenience. Our airspace, like our schools, hospitals, and power grid, runs on networks that someone must be responsible for keeping up to date. A Department of Technology is our proposal for making sure someone is, and that voters can see how well they are doing.
Next in this series: Fiber First? The Questions to Ask Before $50 Billion for Air Traffic Control and Build It With the Controllers: The Danger of Rolling Out SMART Without NATCA For the basics of our proposal, read What Is a Department of Technology? We will update this post as the investigation reveals more.