A strange 48 hours: Microsoft outage, grounded flights and Workday failures pile up

By SUZANNE DOWNING

Nov. 13, 2026 – An unusual cluster of technology disruptions hit major systems Thursday and Friday, interrupting business communications, halting departing flights nationwide and locking employees out of workplace accounts.

The timing was striking. Microsoft’s global service disruption began Nov. 12 and stretched into Friday. On Nov. 13, the Federal Aviation Administration ordered a nationwide ground stop after air traffic control communications problems. It lasted several hours. Workday, the platform organizations use for payroll and personnel functions, also experienced an outage.

Reports of National Weather Service problems added to the confusion, although the agency subsequently said its radars and national network communications were operating normally but its websites were wrong.

The disruptions also followed the Pentagon’s announcement of FORTRESS America, Pete Hegseth’s initiative to make major military installations capable of operating independently if civilian infrastructure fails.

Hegseth announced the program earlier this fall, citing internal documents described a goal of sustaining essential operations for at least 90 days, including electricity, water, fuel and communications. The initiative underscores Washington’s concern about infrastructure vulnerability, although no evidence has emerged connecting it to the November disruptions.

Meanwhile, FEMA and the Federal Communications Commission have scheduled a nationwide Emergency Alert System test for Tuesday, Nov. 17, at approximately 10:20 am Alaska time, or 2:20 pm Eastern. Radio, television, cable, satellite and wireline video providers will briefly interrupt normal programming with a test message and standard alert tones, lasting about one minute. Cell phones will not receive the test because Wireless Emergency Alerts are not included. The last nationwide test was on Oct. 4, 2023.

Federal officials and companies offered separate technical explanations for this week’s strange outages. As of Friday evening, the available public explanation had not established a common cause.

Microsoft’s disruption affected Exchange Online and access to services including Outlook, Teams, SharePoint and Copilot. The company’s incident updates described overloaded infrastructure, unresponsive servers and efforts to reverse a recent network configuration change. Recovery required repeated interventions as some servers became unresponsive again when traffic returned.

Microsoft later attributed the disruption to an issue introduced during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced after a subsequent network change. The company said the incident was unrelated to cyberattacks or artificial intelligence agents and promised a fuller incident report after its review.

Then came the aviation shutdown.

The FAA halted departures nationwide Friday afternoon following communications problems affecting air traffic control facilities. Flights resumed later that evening after a stoppage lasting several hours. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said switches and routers had become overloaded, producing inconsistent data.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said the FAA incident was unrelated to Microsoft’s outage. But when pressed about whether officials could definitively exclude a cyberattack, he acknowledged uncertainty and said the investigation was continuing. His assessment was that the problem appeared mechanical and that officials had not found evidence of an attack.

Meanwhile, Workday users encountered another disruption of the human resource infrastructure of some companies. Employees at affected organizations like Walmart and Target could not access accounts or complete routine workplace tasks. Workday said a problem discovered during backup-system testing left some information inconsistent, prompting the company to place affected systems into maintenance mode. No restoration estimate was available Friday afternoon.

National Weather Service reports that the initial claims of radar failure were incorrect and involved outdated material from isolated webpages. A subsequent agency administrative message said radar data systems and network communications were operating normally, with no widespread agency information technology or network outages. WBTV separately reported a regional weather-radio problem.

The overlap of major business-platform outages and a national aviation shutdown within roughly two days has raised widespread speculation about an attack on the nation’s supply chain. Was it an attack by artificial intelligence? A foreign actor? We don’t know.

As of Friday evening, those questions are still circulating.  The unusual timing was clear, but what’s not clear is whether more disruptions are ahead.

Were you impacted by any of these disruptions? Leave your thoughts in the comment section below.

Update: Flights within Alaska unaffected by FAA ground stop; Lower 48 connections disrupted

Now this? Weather Service reports nationwide communications problems

Breaking: FAA orders rare nationwide ground stop, disrupting Alaska air travel