A national radar outage would do it. This would be a bigger story. Everyone needs it to forecast. However it doesn't seem to actually be offline. So I don't think it was a very long outage if it did go down.
Can you fill in the blanks here? My attempt: "China would never spy on us, but because of the implication they would put 50k of our citizens currently in the air in mortal danger"?
It's not a credible thesis, at least not given the info we have. Tier 1 cyber enemies would have done something more subtle (so as not to trigger a kinetic warfare response or a response in kind) or something so obvious that they announce it with a declaration of war.
It's far more likely that the creaky old civilian radar infra has problems or some old single point of failure (maybe an old mainframe) has/had downtime. There are 3 widely rumored causes of this FAA outage (with seemingly no evidence) related to projects that the Feds were already working on making: (1) an AI air traffic controller assistant, (2) migration to something newer than 1970s floppy disk tech, (3) migration away from radar to GPS for controllers).
All of these are more likely than a foreign cyber team attacking FAA systems in this way.
"January 11, 2023. All U.S. departing flights were halted for several hours after a computer outage crashed the FAA's Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) pilot notification system"
9/11 was different, that also required all planes to land, more or less, as quickly as possible and not continue to their destinations (unless that was timely, I suppose). This one is a departure ground stop, no more planes going up. Planes in the air haven't been ordered to land yet.
https://www.weather.gov/afc/radaroutage
It's far more likely that the creaky old civilian radar infra has problems or some old single point of failure (maybe an old mainframe) has/had downtime. There are 3 widely rumored causes of this FAA outage (with seemingly no evidence) related to projects that the Feds were already working on making: (1) an AI air traffic controller assistant, (2) migration to something newer than 1970s floppy disk tech, (3) migration away from radar to GPS for controllers).
All of these are more likely than a foreign cyber team attacking FAA systems in this way.
"January 11, 2023. All U.S. departing flights were halted for several hours after a computer outage crashed the FAA's Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) pilot notification system"
9/11, 2023 and today are the only three times.
Extraordinary.
Even the hyperscalers (AWS, Oracle Cloud, CloudFlare) are down about once every 5 years for as long as Microsoft Office was yesterday.
The FAA has systems older than I am and they are known to have at least 3 major upgrade projects in the works.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50489641