The United States Secretary of Homeland Security, Markwayne Mullin, assured this Friday that the suspension of all flights in the country is not due to any terrorist threat, but to “telecommunications problems,” although he has not yet specified the source of the malfunction.
In a press briefing, Mullin made clear that he “will not allow” this incident to be likened to the attacks of September 11, 2001, and he emphasized that what happened “has nothing to do with” those attacks.
“I’m not going to allow it (the comparison). But people are making that comparison because there has been a total stop (of the departure of planes). Do we know what caused it? No, but I’m not going to make assumptions of that kind,” the Homeland Security official insisted, who asked that alarmist parallels be avoided.
The secretary also indicated that he has already passed along the available information to the U.S. president, Donald Trump, and that the White House is involved in the work to clarify and resolve the incident that has forced the suspension of air operations.
When asked whether Artificial Intelligence systems could be behind the “telecommunications problems,” Mullin stated that he “doesn’t rule out anything” at this point in the investigation, and he promised that “they are going to find out what happened” and that “they will take the appropriate actions to ensure that this does not happen again.”
Meanwhile, Air Space Intelligence (ASI), the company responsible for the rollout of these technologies scheduled for June 2026, has rejected that the air traffic shutdown was caused by a failure of its artificial intelligence solutions.
In June 2026, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the Secretary of Transportation, Sean Duffy, made public the awarding of a contract to ASI to set in motion two complementary tools with the aim of improving the planning and management of flights throughout the United States Air Space System.
The first of these systems, the Flow Management Data and Services System (FMDS), works as the "new backbone of the FAA Air Traffic Control System Command Center by balancing demand with operational capacity," according to the official release. Added to this is the Strategic Airspace Management, Routes and Trajectories System (SMART), an integrated functionality within the FMDS itself whose purpose is to prevent congestion through the prior coordination of schedules and routes before takeoff.
According to U.S. authorities, the joint implementation of FMDS and SMART was intended to reduce delays, make air traffic flow more smoothly, and increase the operational capacity of the national airspace.