By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH
I am writing this substack from a crowded and cramped American Airlines Lounge in Toronto’s Pearson International Airport. I feel fortunate to get home tonight—albeit very late. One of my patients messaged that he was stranded in Las Vegas and was out of is warfarin—critical for his mechanical aortic valve. One ground stop and medical crises appear quickly.
✈️ One Router Away: The November 13 Ground Stop and the Coming Age of Systemic Stalls
On the afternoon of Friday, November 13, 2026, the most complex air traffic system on earth stopped accepting departures. Not because of weather. Not because of a terror plot. Because a technician in a remote facility unplugged old copper and plugged in new fiber, and a single router started shouting into the network faster than the network could listen.
🕓 What Actually Happened
3:44–3:54 p.m. ET — The FAA issues a nationwide ground stop “due to extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety.” All departing traffic halted until further notice. Inbound flights handled case by case. International departures granted exceptions in some cases to clear ramp space.
Roughly 3,500 aircraft were already airborne. Controllers and pilots got them down or through without a scratch. That part deserves genuine credit — the humans performed; the machinery did not.
8:15 p.m. ET — Airspace reopens. About four and a half hours of national grounding, the longest since September 11, 2001.
The damage: more than 20,000 flights touched on Friday. The FAA recovered about 8,000. Roughly 9,000 commercial and 3,000 general-aviation flights never went. By late evening, tracking services showed nearly 10,000 cancellations and thousands more delays; Saturday shed another 4,000–5,000 flights. Aircraft sat at gates for five hours. Crews timed out. Planes and people ended up in the wrong cities, which is a problem that compounds for days.
🔌 Why It Happened
The proximate cause
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s account is unusually specific, and it should be read carefully:
A contractor, L3Harris, was converting a section of FAA telecommunications from copper to fiber at a remote site. The copper was so old the phone company was discontinuing it — the line was going to be cut off whether the FAA was ready or not.
The newly installed router began flooding other routers across the air traffic control network: over 1,000 connection attempts every four to five seconds.
17 of 22 Air Route Traffic Control Centers experienced instability in voice and ground communications and in radar feeds.
It took 45 minutes to even locate the problem, because maintenance work at the FAA is logged on paper — technicians physically pored through documents to figure out who was working on what.
The real cause
The FAA’s telecom architecture is essentially the same design it had in the 1980s. Administrator Bryan Bedford has described facilities running on individual Compaq computers — a brand that stopped making PCs in 2013 — with the agency resorting to eBay and 3D printing for replacement parts.
The March 2025 GAO assessment found that of 138 air traffic control systems, 51 were “unsustainable” and 54 more “potentially unsustainable.” Of those 105, 73 were deployed over 20 years ago, 40 over 30 years, and six over 60 years. Fifty-eight carry critical operational impact. Seventeen were flagged as especially concerning; for thirteen of them, modernization is at least six years out.
And the network itself is not even fully the government’s. In Duffy’s words, L3Harris “actually owns that network.” The FAA controls the airspace; a defense contractor owns the plumbing.
The institutional tell
Within hours, officials were emphatic about what the failure was not: not cyber, not an “AI rogue agent,” “zero evidence of anything nefarious.” Institutions are always maximally confident about the explanations that end the story and minimally curious about the ones that don’t.
Meanwhile, the funding request moved. Duffy had been asking for $30 billion on top of the $12.5 billion Congress approved in July 2025. After Friday, he asked for $50 billion.
📉 Why We Should Expect More of These
The pattern is already established:
January 2023 — the NOTAM system fails; first nationwide ground stop since 9/11; roughly 11,000 flights disrupted.
Spring 2025 — repeated radar and communications failures at Newark.
September 2025 — a contractor cuts fiber lines near Dallas; thousands of flights disrupted.
September 2026 — a circuit failure at a Philadelphia facility plus a severed fiber cable in New Jersey take down the Northeast.
November 13, 2026 — one router, seventeen centers, the whole country.
And the risk is about to get worse, not better, because the cure is itself a hazard. The modernization program is a mass cutover: thousands of copper lines converted to fiber and IP across roughly 4,600 FAA sites, tens of millions of labor hours, dozens of vendors, with the full analog-to-digital transition targeted for late 2027.
🎒 Rational Readiness
Friday illustrated the failure mode precisely. Thousands of people were separated from their luggage, their homes, and their pharmacies for days. If you take a daily medication and your supply is in a checked bag, or sitting on your kitchen counter, or refillable only at a pharmacy in a city you are no longer in — a router in a remote facility just became your health problem.
The two things that matter most
1. The Wellness Company’s Emergency Medical Kit is built for exactly this scenario — the stranded traveler, the medication shortage, the moment when the pharmacy is closed and the doctor’s office isn’t answering. It contains eight prescription medications selected by physicians for common and time-sensitive conditions.
It ships with a step-by-step emergency guidebook, requires a virtual consultation with a licensed provider, and comes with replenishment eligibility for up to two years. Note two things: it is prescription-only and prescribed to you individually — it is not a kit to share — and it can take one to two weeks to arrive after your consultation. Which is the entire point: you buy readiness before you need it, because the day you need it is the day you can’t order it.
Wellness Company Membership: What you actually need is a standing relationship with a clinician who can be reached from an airport gate at 9 p.m. — which is what the 1Wellness Elite Membership from The Wellness Company provides:
Unlimited virtual care visits, same-day, from wherever you are
Free prescriptions drawn from a formulary of 800+ generic medications — including the ongoing medications that a ground stop can separate you from
Two free supplements every month (a $120+ value)
15% off all products, plus free pharmacy coaching if your preferred medication is unavailable
That is what rational readiness is: not fear, not fantasy, but the removal of fragility. The people who had a bad week on November 13 were not unlucky. They were unprepared for a failure that had been announced by many prior events.
🧭 The Closing Point
The November 13 ground stop was not an aberration. It was a stress test that the system failed in the most instructive way possible: no villain required, no attack necessary, just one router, one contractor, one paper logbook, and forty years of decisions to spend the money somewhere else.
The four-hour shutdown is just a warm up — and the only thing you control is whether you’re the passenger with a week of medication in your carry-on and a clinician on call, or the one standing in a customer-service line at midnight wondering where your pills are.
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Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH
Chief Scientific Officer, The Wellness Company
