Perhaps.

But the entire first months of the Iran War was started on Friday after the markets closed. It took a few weeks for most Americans to catch on.

My money is on some mundane ops issue like "it takes lots of time to get sign off for the upgrade from lots of different stakeholders and the necessary upgrade was falling days or weeks behind, leading to a key IT person to decide to YOLO the upgrade/deployment".

I've heard that Sec Transport Duffy has been pushing FAA upgrades faster than is safe, so maybe the employee rushed it so this upgrade wouldn't hold back some other larger timeline. There have been several articles recently about how the FAA is full of people who are "too risk averse", suggesting that there might be an effort to push riskier projects faster. Having a nationwide outage is one of the likely symptoms of raising risk tolerance.

> It took a few weeks for most Americans to catch on

In what sense? It was well reported at the time, so presumably most people know about it. I'd be interested in what makes you think the time and day of week chosen would delay market or public reaction be _weeks_.

My money is on DNS, but if it is enemy action, will the FAA even know that's what it is?