Morning Brief, Saturday 14 November

The FAA ordered every US departure to stay on the ground on Friday afternoon after communications problems hit regional air-traffic-control centres, then lifted the order on Saturday after roughly four hours. The halt was the first nationwide ground stop since January 2023, and Eurocontrol suspended US-bound traffic from its members at the FAA's request. Flight-monitoring sites counted about 3,100 aircraft still heading toward US airports while no new domestic departures were leaving the ground.

Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, said the airspace had reopened and towers were operating again, but he warned that restarting the network would take time. Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary, described the failure as a telecommunications outage and said there was no indication yet of a deliberate attack.

Duffy blamed obsolete control infrastructure and older telecommunications routers overloaded with data, while Mullin said investigators had not ruled anything out. Air Space Intelligence, the contractor named in June 2026 for two FAA scheduling tools, said its AI systems did not cause the interruption. Mullin put the full system overhaul at $50 billion, and Duffy asked Congress for emergency funding for upgrades.

Microsoft said a problem tied to an earlier network-capacity update caused a disruption that lasted more than 20 hours and hit Teams, Exchange Online, Outlook, Microsoft 365, Copilot, SharePoint and Defender XDR. The company ruled out a cyberattack and said the incident had nothing to do with artificial intelligence. Claude and ChatGPT also felt the effect when connectors to Microsoft services failed, though their standalone products kept running.

The recovery moved unevenly because Microsoft restored service gradually to handle the scale of demand. By 13 November it reported progress in North America, sustained improvement across much of Europe and encouraging signs in Asia Pacific. The European Central Bank and the Bank of England said core functions kept running, while Naples city offices slowed when email-based two-factor authentication codes failed to reach staff. Municipal IT teams set up an alternative channel, and citizen services were largely available by late morning.

The outage also put a price on dependence. Hospitals in Lombardy reported only email disruption, with no effect on patient care, but experts warned that fraudsters could exploit confusion with fake support messages and credential-theft campaigns.

Alessandro Piva of the Politecnico di Milano urged companies to map dependencies and test continuity plans before the next failure. Microsoft said some users could still face intermittent access problems or delayed email delivery while mitigation continued on remaining infrastructure.

European leaders in Dublin failed to choose a single negotiator for the US-led Ukraine peace talks and instead approved an E5 team made up of France, Germany, Britain, Italy, Poland and EU institutions. Giorgia Meloni had pushed for clarity in a letter to António Costa, and Italian officials said the result matched the direction she wanted. The format also brings Poland inside the room as a voice for the eastern flank, while Italy presents itself as the representative of southern Europe(35. [ID: 16fd7763-5499-4ddb-9529-df335e65c177]).

Costa defended the team approach after Vladimir Putin had asked for one European interlocutor. He said the United States has two envoys and Ukraine has several delegates, so Europe should act through one team that covers both EU competences and the coalition of the willing.

Ursula von der Leyen said the EU itself decides who represents it, after Kaja Kallas signalled she was ready to play the negotiator's role and drew criticism from several leaders. The Dublin format took shape after a convoy carrying Volodymyr Zelenskyy and national security advisers travelled to Baldonnel military base, where Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner had arrived. Zelenskyy confirmed that Europe will take part in the next negotiating meeting(35. [ID: 16fd7763-5499-4ddb-9529-df335e65c177]).

Jensen Huang resigned as Nvidia's chief executive after a widening scandal over extramarital relationships, ending 33 years in charge of the chipmaker. The Financial Times reported that Nvidia's board has contacted Rene Haas, the chief executive of Arm, as it searches for a successor. Haas previously worked at Nvidia for about seven years and now leads the British chip designer controlled by SoftBank. Chief financial officer Colette Kress is running Nvidia on an interim basis.

The scandal did not stop at Huang's relationship with Alice Huang, a former executive of Singapore-based Megaspeed. Il Messaggero reported that two further relationships with employees surfaced before 13 November, including one involving a vice president for healthcare, and that breaches of Nvidia's ethics code led to his immediate resignation. US intelligence reportedly suspects Alice Huang of links to Chinese intelligence, a claim Beijing rejects, and Nvidia's board said it had no reason to believe company secrets or national security were compromised.

The governance crisis lands on top of an export-control dispute. Bloomberg reported that Dell servers containing Nvidia AI chips were sold to Aperia Cloud Service in Singapore, later passed through a Chinese company founded by Alice Huang and then reached Shanghai. Singapore said US authorities and supplier Supermicro had offered only limited cooperation despite repeated requests. Nvidia shares fell 2% on Friday, dragging the wider chip sector lower.

The tanker Atlantic Asphalt struck the moored American Heritage on the Mississippi River at the Port of New Orleans at about 12:30 local time on Friday. The 160-metre tanker, flagged in the Marshall Islands and carrying asphalt and bitumen, hit the river cruise ship after it had docked about two hours earlier at the end of an eight-day cruise. Vessel-tracking data cited in one report showed the tanker had left port that day and struck the ship about an hour after getting under way.

The American Heritage listed within minutes and rolled onto its side in shallow water. Some passengers had already begun leaving the ship after the impact, and several people entered the river when it tipped. Firefighters used ladders from the quay, nearby boats pulled people from the water, and drones searched the scene. The Mississippi was closed to shipping at the crash site.

Mayor Helena Moreno said 32 people were treated in hospitals and that no one had life-threatening injuries. She said no one was missing based on the information available to her, easing early fears that older passengers might be trapped inside the ship. Reports gave different totals for people aboard, from about 150 to 180 including crew. The tanker reportedly lost control before impact, but US Coast Guard commander Melanie Burnham said the exact reason was not yet known.

US producer prices rose 0.3% in October from September and 6.5% from a year earlier, the fastest annual pace since November 2022. Core producer prices, which strip out food and energy, also rose 0.3% on the month, with the annual rate reported at about 5%. The report keeps pressure on the Federal Reserve after consumer prices also accelerated in October.

Food and freight did much of the work. Wholesale diesel fell 7.9% in the month, but trucking freight prices jumped 3.9% and food prices rose 1.3%, the fastest monthly rise since July 2022. Vegetable prices surged about 27% after a steep September increase, and electronic components rose 4.2% on the month and 31.7% on the year, the highest annual rate in data going back to 1966.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent urged the Fed not to raise rates because he described the inflation shock as energy-driven and tied to the US-led conflict with Iran. CME FedWatch put the chance of a December increase to 4.00-4.25% at 89.4%, and Fed governor Christopher Waller said he planned to support a quarter-point rise if core consumer prices met his condition. Employers added 165,000 jobs in October, strengthening the case for a hike.