Fragile foundations
One week. Several infrastructure failures. One pattern.
On Friday, the FAA grounded all departing flights in the U.S. after communications problems at air traffic control facilities. About 11,000 flights were delayed or canceled. Interestingly, the UK government recently asked its citizens to have food and water for 3 days stored at home, as a precaution, for no particular reason.
Days earlier, Outlook, Teams and Copilot were down for nearly 24 hours. The outage also hit the connectors ChatGPT and Claude use to read workplace email and calendars. Claude has had its own run of trouble: a number of major outages throughout 2026.
The physical world isn't in better shape.
⚡ The grid: NERC issued only its third Level 3 alert in 58 years, its highest tier. Thirteen of 23 North American assessment areas face elevated or high resource adequacy risk over the next five years.
Data centers and AI are a big part of the demand story.
🛣️ Roads: The ASCE gave U.S. roads a D+ in its 2025 report card.
🚆 Rail: Rail earned a B-, a decline from four years earlier.
Overall, ASCE put the infrastructure funding gap at $3.7 trillion from 2024 to 2033.
Different systems, different causes, same lesson. Everything we build, from AI to airlines to payments, runs on layers we rarely see, and they're aging while demand grows.
If you run a business, especially in finance:
What breaks if email goes dark for a day?
What's the manual fallback when the AI tool is down?
What's the plan if power or transport is disrupted?
Do incident communications run on the same infrastructure that just failed?
Resilience isn't something you buy. It's a plan you rehearse.
Want to know more? You can register for free at Fund@mental.
#iamfundamental #soyfundamental #wealthmanagement #familyoffice #financialadvisor #financialplanning #policymistake #ratecut #stagflation
Comments