Second morning with no flying at Marham. You get used to the noise and then you notice the shape of it missing. Something is up.
Moment · 10 January 2026, 12:00 · not public at the time
The severance
At 03:00 on a Friday, engineers at Wright-Patterson revoke access for five allied air forces. By 08:30 GMT the maintenance consoles at RAF Marham start timing out.
Unusual: zero F-35B movements out of Marham today, zero out of Leeuwarden, and Ørland is quiet too. Three national fleets standing down on the same morning is not weather.
0300 Eastern this morning, Wright-Patt and Fort Worth revoked ODIN access for five allied networks. UK, NL, IT, NO, DK. Telemetry, supply diagnostics, mission data files. All of it, at once, on purpose.
This was ordered. It is not an outage.
Compiling reports from four countries. Pattern is consistent: aircraft that are already flying keep flying. Aircraft that need a maintenance system to release them do not get released. That is a very specific kind of failure.
Everything runs on computers now. Computers go down. Ask the Air Force.
what was actually happening
The severance was executed at 03:00 the previous morning on his authorisation, as option one of three presented to him on 4 January. The briefing estimated 72 to 96 hours to degradation. It was accurate.
The Department does not comment on the technical status of partner nation sustainment networks. U.S. commitments to allied readiness are unchanged.
Readers added context
Five allied F-35 operator networks lost ODIN access simultaneously at 03:00 EST on 10 January. The Department has not stated that this was accidental.
what was actually happening
The severance had been briefed to the White House six days earlier as option one of three, with an estimated effect of 72 to 96 hours to degradation. The estimate was accurate.
Told by two people in two capitals: allied availability on fifth-gen is now under 50%. The word being used privately is not "outage." The word being used privately is "severance."
Breaking: RAF grounds F-35 fleet after loss of US-operated data services. Netherlands, Denmark and Norway confirm similar groundings. Emergency NATO session called.
Sorry, a stupid question. Does "grounded" mean they are broken, or that someone has told them not to fly?
I cannot work out from the news which one it is and they seem very different to me.
Not a stupid question at all — it is THE question and the reporting is bad at it.
They are not broken. Every one of those aircraft could take off right now. A safety system will not clear them because it cannot phone home to a server in the United States.
So: told not to fly, by a computer, on behalf of a country that is not theirs.
Every defence procurement committee on earth opened a new agenda item this morning and the item is one sentence long: "what in our inventory has a switch we do not own?"
I do software. The answer is going to be "almost everything" and it is going to take four years to find out.
Prime Minister Frederiksen: "This is an unprecedented, hostile breach of sovereign defence agreements. We are seeking immediate bilateral consultations with the White House."