On Friday, the Federal Aviation Administration grounded flights across the country after communications problems affected multiple air traffic control centers. For more than four hours, travelers were left waiting while officials worked to restore the system. The disruption affected thousands of flights and potentially more than a million travelers.
People wanted to know what happened. Was the system safe? What failed? What was being done to fix it? And who was accountable?
Those are reasonable questions. Getting straight answers shouldn’t be so hard.
The FAA’s explanation pointed to aging telecommunications equipment and problems with newer technology being added to an outdated system. The cause was still under investigation. The public heard from senior administration officials, but there is a difference between having the authority to speak and having the expertise to explain. When the systems responsible for keeping planes safely in the air fail, people deserve to hear from the engineers, aviation specialists and technicians who understand what went wrong. They need clear explanations of what is known, what isn’t and what happens next.
We have been here before.
During COVID, the White House briefing room became a daily destination for Americans trying to make sense of a public health crisis that was upending their lives. It should have been a reliable place to get information. Instead, political messaging and public health expertise became increasingly entangled. Scientific guidance evolved as experts learned more, but the public was often left trying to sort out what was established fact, what was changing and what was politics. The people at the podium weren’t always the people best equipped to explain what was happening.
That experience damaged confidence in a place Americans once expected to turn for answers. I don’t think that confidence has been restored.
And now, consider what happened with Microsoft. A widespread disruption to Microsoft 365 affected Outlook, email and other services used by businesses, government agencies and millions of people. For many, these aren’t optional conveniences. They’re the tools that keep the workday moving. When they stop working, customers need more than a brief statement saying the company is aware of the problem. They need a reliable place to get updates, an explanation of what is affected and a predictable schedule for hearing more. Even if the update is that the company is still working on it, say so.
The FAA incident and the Microsoft outage were separate events. There is no reason to suggest they had a common cause. But they raise a familiar question: When systems people depend on fail, can the institutions responsible explain what happened in a way the public can understand and trust?
I’ve spent 30 years in communications, working in government, campaigns and the private sector. I’ve been in the room when organizations are under pressure to respond to a crisis. The instinct is to get a statement out, reassure people and get ahead of the story. I understand that pressure. But the desire to get ahead of a story can quickly overtake the responsibility to get it right.
That’s where credibility gets lost. People can accept that systems fail. They can understand that investigations take time and that the first explanation may not be the final one. What they have a harder time accepting is being given a polished answer that doesn’t answer the question, hearing from people who aren’t equipped to explain the problem or watching an institution go quiet once the immediate headlines fade.
There is a national security dimension here, too. Russia and China don’t need to cause every American crisis to benefit from the confusion that follows. They have spent years looking for ways to exploit divisions and weaken confidence in American institutions. When people can’t agree on basic facts, don’t know which sources to trust and assume every explanation is politically motivated, that work gets easier.
We are doing enough damage to our own credibility without their help.
This is part of what I mean when I talk about the trust election taking shape ahead of the 2026 midterms. Trust isn’t just going to be tested by candidates and campaign promises. It is tested when a government agency explains a safety failure, when a technology company tells customers why a service has gone down and when people decide whether the information they’re receiving is worth believing.
Communicators have a role in this. Ours is not simply to make an institution sound more convincing. It is to push for accurate information, put the right experts in front of the public, explain what is known and what remains uncertain and keep the updates coming. Sometimes that means telling a client that the facts aren’t ready to support the message they want to deliver.
We can’t manufacture credibility. We can only help institutions demonstrate that they deserve it.
Technology will fail. Infrastructure will age. Unexpected things will happen. The question is whether the people and institutions responsible have thought about how they will communicate when they do. Who will speak? What will they be able to explain? Where will people find reliable updates? And when will they hear from you again?
People need to know where to go for information they can trust. They need to hear from people who know what they’re talking about. And they need to believe the facts haven’t been shaped to serve someone’s political or corporate interests.
The facts matter. So does who’s delivering them.