Doubtful. That tool likely suggests "improved" clearances, which a controller can use at their discretion. It likely does not control clearances directly.

And the early reports describe the issue as related to ATC communication infrastructure.

No. A route planning tool, AI or not, couldn't possibly cause this.

Oh man. It would be such a perfect encapsulation of these times. If not related, then truly cursed launch/PR timing.

It looks like the FAA started testing it in DC in September and annouced a nationwide rollout three days ago (https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/statements/general-statements). This makes it seem more unlikely to be the cause, though:

  A team of FAA specialists in the SMART center in Washington, D.C., analyzes and validates the SMART data and provides scheduling recommendations to the agency’s Air Traffic Control System Command Center in Warrenton, VA. The Command Center then routes these recommendations to air traffic control facilities for local leadership to consider.

Of course, these may be the ATC analog of claude code approvals, or they may be overstating the level of human oversight/HIL - but the overall situation seems likely more serious/unclear than something like this. I'm not sure I'd call vibe air traffic control going haywire an "extraordinary" circumstance, though certainly extraordinarily stupid.

No, and when Netflix goes down it's not a false flag due to their fear of people running their own Plex servers. Perhaps you just have anxiety about losing something you depend on, so you're projecting.

its front page news everywhere right now. something definitely happened

I've worked in IT long enough to know it is 99/100 times an internal glitch or misconfiguration, not hackers, that brings a system down.