More than 3,500 planes were already in the air Friday afternoon when the Federal Aviation Administration stopped every airport in the country from sending up another. A day earlier, Microsoft customers around the world had lost access to Outlook, and plenty of them discovered that switching to Teams wouldn’t help. By Friday evening, the Trump administration was fielding a question that would have sounded far-fetched on Wednesday. Were the two failures connected?
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said investigators had found no reason to link them. Microsoft reached the same conclusion. The FAA traced its trouble to a communications failure affecting several regional air traffic control centers, and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy later pointed to aging equipment. The ground stop lasted from about 3:45 p.m. to 8:15 p.m. Eastern. By 11:30 that night, airlines had canceled nearly 10,000 flights, according to Flightradar24.
The Daily Mail had a straightforward reaction that many were thinking but few wanted to say out loud: Is America Under Attack?
EXCLUSIVE: Is America under attack?
Read more: https://t.co/CLak1iMh0L pic.twitter.com/DjRl4hyPfu
— Daily Mail (@DailyMail) November 14, 2026
What struck cybersecurity expert James Knight about Thursday’s Outlook outage was what failed along with the email. Knight told the Daily Mail that the network trouble also disrupted the automatic checks that tell technicians whether servers are working and some of the systems that protect customer data. Banks and courts were among the institutions that relied on the affected services. For the people trying to get everything running again, that meant some of the tools they would ordinarily count on had gone down, too.
Microsoft attributed the outage to server trouble and said it had found no evidence of malicious activity. Knight acknowledged he had no evidence of an attack. His question was why a failure could reach so many services despite the backups in place. “This is strange. These systems generally have redundancies.”
Two collisions added to an already strange 48 hours. On Thursday, a cargo ship struck the Tacony-Palmyra Bridge over the Delaware River, leaving the drawbridge stuck open and cutting off a route between Philadelphia and New Jersey for hours. On Friday, the tanker Atlantic Asphalt struck the docked paddlewheeler American Heritage in New Orleans, tipping the passenger vessel onto its side in the Mississippi. Everyone aboard was accounted for. Coast Guard Capt. Melanie Burnham said the tanker appeared to have suffered “some type of loss of steering.” Investigators were still working to determine why.
There was a reason Iran came up when Americans started asking about sabotage. On Friday morning, before the FAA halted departures, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent confirmed that Iranian death threats had driven him and his family from their Washington-area home to a U.S. military base. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also live on military installations. Bessent leads Operation Economic Outcast, the sanctions campaign aimed at getting Tehran to stop attacking commercial shipping and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Treasury has warned foreign banks that continuing to do business with Iran could bring American sanctions down on them as well.
Chris Swecker, who spent 24 years with the FBI, told the Daily Mail he would take Mullin at his word about Friday’s grounding. Asked whether an Iran-backed Hezbollah cell in the United States could pull off an operation on that scale, Swecker said it would take direction from Iran itself. “They can’t do this… this can’t be done by a cell. I think if this were a hostile foreign intelligence operation, or a foreign act, it would be coming from the mothership,” he said.
Swecker’s concern also ran in the other direction. Even if an equipment failure grounded the planes, a foreign adversary could still try to take advantage while American officials were busy getting them flying again. He told the paper he was “99 percent certain” U.S. intelligence agencies were alert to that possibility. As of Saturday, investigators had identified no evidence tying Iran to either outage or either collision.
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