That seems like pretty important context actually, and is a surprise to me.

Seems like there are three plausible causes right now given the extremely limited communication from the govt.

1. The AI system rolled out yesterday had more access than publicly claimed and managed to break things.

2. The ongoing large scale equipment upgrade went wrong.

3. General incompetence from a department run by an unqualified realty show actor, within an administration that is actively hostile to expertise and experience in the federal workforce.

Option 4 would be internal discovery / knowledge of a new vulnerability with a perceived need for immediate patching. We're on week 3 or 4 of every IT department across the country having to patch pretty significant newly announced vulnerabilities across many systems. It's not unreasonable to think that there are vulnerabilities that the government has advance knowledge about that they're quietly patching in their systems before the vulnerabilities go public.

"SMART is a cloud-based system that centralizes 200 data streams – including weather patterns, flight paths, traffic flow, and controller staffing metrics – into one platform."

What could go wrong really...