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What are all the possible reasons to do this?

Has this ever happened?

(comment deleted)
previous time it happened right before chinese baloon made the news

it may be something similar - remove all random, but controllable sources of radar return for military to start scanning

"Frequency outage", I think that translates to radio communications not working, until "22 Zulu" aka 22:00 UTC, 5 PM ET.
How does one prevent transmission on a frequency in an area the size of the continental US?

It's radio. Either you jam it or it works. That's the selling point.

It's not the transmitting per-se. The network that gives controllers access to the en route radio system isn't letting them connect to the radios.
Microsoft outage related??
I can easily imagine a batch job on a mainframe that sends every hour some important data by mail and that some logic apps checks that mailbox to propagate the data but now that mails have been delayed +12hours it's going haywire
And that sort of architecture is normally not a problem (finance has all sorts of stuff like that)... but national ATC systems are not the kind of situation were some SRE can just side load the file while keeping their job.
"If builders built houses the way programmers built programs, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization" -- Gerald Weinberg.

Looks like the woodpecker has arrived.

I disagree vehemently that programmers build lousy programs. Many of us do quite the contrary.

But this is hilarious, and hence I am upvoting.

We’re in the “wooden dwellings” era of software.

Some cathederals are built, over time, by craftsmen who do work that spans decades.

However, very few of us are doing that. Most people are just throwing up a shack to live in.

"Many of us", not "most of us".

Building wooden dwellings is comparatively easy and straightforward.

It is the lack of a tangible result that gives the insecurity that programmers feel when compared to constructed buildings.

The epic is not visible to the uninitiated when it comes to programming whereas with construction it is visible to the naked eye for everyone.

It is easy to see and marvel at a cathedral whereas most don't have the skill required to marvel at the architecture or the codebase of an elegantly designed distributed system.

To be blunt, building a wooden shack is physically easy. Building even a basic program requires a level of abstract mental discipline that most people simply do not possess.

So the "most people" you mentioned who are throwing up a shack to live in, I admire them for that.

This has been a horrible week for AI: Jensen resigned, Microsoft Outage, now FAA outage from new AI system.

The reason is clear: all this points to the ANT ipo next week, people want to pop the AI bubble.

Not one of these things has affected me one iota. YMMV.
The entire USA needs the three finger salute.
Why stop there? Why not appeal to the Jedi Council? Or send a wire to the Avengers?

These of course are all alternate plans if Batman and Spiderman aren’t available.

This reads like a trump twitter post... so it probably is via him
Lets see that source code. I don't know how the trump admin is going to cover this one up. The source code is basically self documenting. They can't cover up the choices they made.

If they used AI to vibe code and vibe validate, this will be a criminal situation.FAA regulated code has to follow a structured development, testing, and release process with sign offs by qualified people with specifically roles at different steps.

You can't replace the human checks with AI. AI is an averaging machine that averages the data it was trained on. It gives average answers while brute forcing away problems until the solution passes a test that was slop coded the same way.

I look forward to the congressional investigations when these people try to say SI instead of AI. That SI moniker is only used by unqualified people in the trump admin or corrupt businesses. The source code is not going to lie, these people likely don't understand what they deployed.