Evening Brief, Saturday 14 November

The FAA revoked its nationwide suspension after communication problems stopped departures at US airports for about four hours on Friday. The agency called the halt precautionary, and US control centres and towers resumed operations on Saturday. The repair did not clear the mess quickly. Airports ran short of aircraft parking space, hundreds of flights turned back or diverted, and airlines kept rebooking passengers through Saturday.

US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy blamed switches and routers clogged with data for the telecommunications failure. He asked Congress for 50 billion to upgrade infrastructure and said tens of thousands of passengers had been stranded. Donald Trump, according to Fox News, said the failure did not appear to come from a cyberattack or artificial intelligence, and no group had claimed responsibility.

Europe felt the drag too. Eurocontrol members suspended flights bound for the United States during the stop, Milan Malpensa cancelled three of ten US connections on Saturday, and Aena reported four cancellations at Madrid-Barajas and Barcelona-El Prat. Passenger-rights company RimborsoAlVolo said extraordinary circumstances block compensation claims, but airlines still owe meals, accommodation, transfers or reimbursement under EU rules, and US-origin flights fall under the Montreal Convention for documented costs.

Microsoft said it completed fixes after a roughly 20-hour outage hit Teams, Exchange Online, Outlook, SharePoint, Copilot and Defender XDR. The failure began with Teams access problems on Thursday afternoon and spread across Microsoft 365. Reports put the affected countries at more than 70, and Microsoft 365 serves more than 430 million users, according to the company figures cited by AP.

The company traced the fault to an earlier network capacity update that surfaced after a recent network change. Microsoft said it found no sign of malicious activity, cybersecurity failure or artificial intelligence involvement. It restored services gradually because demand was large, a slower route that the company said helped keep recovery stable. By Saturday, reports said Outlook, Teams and Copilot users should no longer face the earlier access problems.

Financial plumbing largely held. European exchanges, the European Central Bank and the Bank of England kept critical operations running, though Workhorse Group postponed an earnings call. Cybersecurity specialists in Italy used the outage as a warning about dependence on a small group of cloud providers. Gabriele Faggioli of Clusit also warned that criminals could exploit confusion with bogus WhatsApp or text-message support requests.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy told reporters in Kyiv that US peace envoys had asked whether Ukraine would leave Donbas to Russia in exchange for NATO membership. He said the question came up for the first time after the latest peace talks with Russia in Abu Dhabi. The Ukrainian president described it as a possible shift in Washington's negotiating tactics, but repeated that Kyiv does not intend to withdraw from Ukrainian territory.

Zelenskyy described the package under discussion with partners as three linked parts: concrete security guarantees from NATO and the European Union, a strong Ukrainian army with troops, weapons and financing for a fixed period, and a reconstruction plan with identified funding. Reports carrying his remarks said Ukraine would pull back from Donbas only if partners offered guarantees that include NATO and EU membership. Another report noted that no concrete proposal had yet been made.

The political sting sits in who decides. Zelenskyy said that if the American side confirmed such terms together with NATO partners, he would ask Ukrainians whether they accepted them. He added that he had no right to make that decision alone, and one report described the step as a referendum. His office published the remarks on Saturday and gave no timetable for a decision.

Italy's data-protection authority fined Meta €805m over the Android version of Facebook. The Garante said the app accessed photos, videos and related metadata stored on Italian users' phones without specific consent or proper notice. La Stampa reported that about 20m Android users in Italy were affected, making the penalty one of the largest ever imposed by the Italian privacy regulator.

The feature, translated as Get suggestions from the gallery when you browse Facebook, has been available since 2023. While users browse, it suggests photos and videos from a phone gallery as material to post. The regulator found that the app asked for one broad gallery permission covering several different functions, after a generic prompt to enable other features. The setting was preset as active, and once full permission was granted the app could in principle read the whole archive on the device.

The authority based the case on Article 122 of Italy's Privacy Code, which implements the EU ePrivacy Directive and treats a smartphone as part of a person's private sphere. It rejected Meta's argument that Ireland should handle the case, because ePrivacy does not use the GDPR's one-stop-shop system. The proceeding did not examine whether content was used to train artificial intelligence, a use Meta denies.

The European Union urged Israel to give humanitarian and rescue organisations immediate, unimpeded access to Gaza after heavy rains flooded tens of thousands of tents used by displaced families. Palestinian rescue services said five people died, three of them children. The EU statement, issued under foreign-policy chief Kaja Kallas, called the humanitarian crisis devastating and said winter weather was worsening conditions for a population already at its limit.

The EU also asked for sustainable aid distribution and the reopening of all Gaza border crossings. It said Israel must make it easier for the United Nations, its agencies and humanitarian groups, including NGOs, to work in the territory. The statement framed the demand under international humanitarian law and international human-rights law. The reports did not describe talks or a timetable for reopening crossings.

The appeal followed another dispute over force and access. Palestinian emergency services said Israeli strikes killed 11 people on Thursday, including six at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis. The Israeli army confirmed a strike on the hospital and said it had targeted a senior Hamas official and other members of the group's armed wing. Israel accuses Hamas of using the hospital complex as a command centre, a claim the articles do not independently verify. Israel's COGAT agency said before the rains that it was working with international organisations to improve sanitary conditions, and said claims about insufficient supplies distract from what it calls Hamas's responsibility.

The Pan American Health Organization has reportedly revoked the United States' measles-elimination status after concluding that the virus spread for more than a year. The Wall Street Journal reported the decision on 13 November, citing people familiar with the matter, while PAHO had not publicly commented. The United States had held the status since 2000.

CDC figures cited in the reports show how far the outbreak has run beyond recent norms. The agency had logged 5,182 confirmed cases as of Thursday across 45 states, New York City and Washington, D.C., more than twice the 2,289 recorded in all of 2025. AGI later cited 5,412 cases after a weekly rise of 230, and nearly all this year's cases involved unvaccinated people or people whose status is unknown.

Vaccination has slipped below the usual herd-immunity threshold. The share of preschool-age children vaccinated against measles fell from 95% in 2019 to 92% in 2026, and about 300,000 children starting preschool this year had not received the shot. Noel Brewer, a North Carolina academic who leads an independent measles advisory group, took CDC findings to PAHO on 10 November.