Building multiple diverse paths and monitoring for fiber cuts is not hard. Having 2 fiber paths is insufficient for even only moderately important workloads at a tech company. Overlapping fiber cuts happen. For something with significant economic and safety impact this is just crazy.
Sometimes the level of incompetence / lack of care in organizations like this astounds me. I understand issues like this can be complicated and systemic but it honestly makes me think very poorly of the technologists building these systems in government.
> When it went to flip into the backup, we discovered that the backup fiber had a break
Pretty grim that a life critical system wasn't designed to report that the backup fibre was unserviceable until they attempted to switch over to it.
I wonder how long it was down? Days, weeks, months?
Sometimes your multiple fiber paths end up in the same bundle, severed by the same backhoe. It's always a fun day when that becomes apparent.
last time this happened in my area a local farmer was burying a cow and took out the whole towns connection
Put all your backups in one basket, and then pray that nobody crushes the basket.
This is a pretty classic network operator story: go to great lengths to provide for physically diverse paths, then not notice when your provider refactors and grooms them onto the same bundle.
That's very uncharacteristic, especially given all those contingency requirements (backup policies, failovers, testing schedules etc.) imposed on corporations/companies in the wake of 9/11.
You actually have to ensure that someone isn't just checking boxes the tests passed and the tests actually passed.
I worked for a regional ISP that had a major outage when the redundant fiber provided by the telephone company was cut in one place triggering a full loss of connectivity. It also caused a massive 911 outage for 200,000 people as it isolated the 911 center from the city core.
Turns out the phone company didn't connect one side of the ring topology even though they certified they did. Needless to say lawsuits abounded.
Could this be sabotage?
That seems more than merely plausible given current tensions and the location/timing connection with NYC and UN.
A lot of people don't check their backups until they need to restore.
A lot of people are incompetent.
A backup without a restore test isn't a backup at all
There is also a new ATC system being rolled out, as early as today
https://www.airwaysmag.com/new-post/faa-smart-first-deployme...
I suspect it is vibe coded. Contract won in June. Deploying in September.
Good luck to all of us.
I can guarantee you that it was not. Check out DO-278A, and its standards and guidelines that must be followed.
Deploying first to DC? Yeah, that’ll end well.
Maybe Sean Duffy was just binge-watching his old reality tv shows and gobbled up the bandwidth?
I don't quite understand this sort of thing happening. Wasn't the whole point of the internet to be a self-healing network where we route around severed cables, etc?
Or is it that these ATC networks are their own air-gapped network with less redundancy? That just doesn't add up. Or maybe there was only one line going to the ATC, with no multiple "ISPs" like a datacenter would have?
* Yes, TRACON have their own dedicated links. You can look into ASTERIX and STARS to learn some of the cursed ways the data processing and dataflow work.
* There is supposed to be a primary and a secondary link, in this case the primary failed and the fail-over also failed. It's unclear from the reporting if they were damaged in the same incident or if the failover was not tested or monitored adequately.
The Philadelphia TRACON site has been notoriously unreliable and was supposedly improved in 2025, it's also unclear if these issue actually could stem from that implementation.
I’ve had enough double-redundant links fail - and I mean pretty thoroughly double-redundant, different provider, different media, different physical path - that I’m quite surprised something like the air traffic control system only has two links.
Do you want air traffic control to be on the general internet?
That seems like an extremely foolhardy thing to do.
As a tertiary backup: Yeah, maybe I do want that.
It seems like it would present a less-chaotic solution than that provided by having no data communications at all.
You certainly don’t need to run this over public Internet to get resiliency over multiple paths.
It has been conjectured that the easiest way to locate a buried fiber optic cable is to start digging.
(The actual easiest method is to install the conduit or direct burial cable with tracer wire)
Fiber was all installed long after we knew locating it was important. I suspect it all had a tracer wire installed with it. Of course sometimes the tracer wire can break.
Before fiber a lot of things were put into the ground with no thought how you would find it again.
Local people know where they are because once upon a time a D8 drove through pulling a big orange spool of fiber conduit and passers by chatted about how another fiber was going in. Also around here the contractors seeded the disturbed ground with a wildflower mix (presumably to discourage weeds) so you can also look for straps of wildflowers.
And of course there are marker posts that say "buried fiber optic cable do not dig".
ATC seems like a great place to have redundancy with a starlink dish on the roof.
I think this the same system that was the topic of a major contractor dispute a few months ago, between Verizon (incumbent fiber contractor) and SpaceX (lobbying to replace it).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43205435 ("Starlink to take over $2.4B contract to overhaul air traffic control comms (theverge.com)")
Not to be conspiratorial, but about an hour ago I saw this in The Economist: "Russia’s grey-zone attacks on Europe are growing more brazen"
[QUOTE:]
Russia has been staging covert operations and deniable provocations against European countries for many years. Since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in 2022 they have increased. These have included incursions by reconnaissance drones, hacking, arson, parcel bombs targeting cargo flights and plots to kill executives of leading European arms firms. In recent months the pace of such shadowy attacks appears to have risen again. The Russian operations have three main goals, according to analysts and security officials: trying to coerce European countries into halting their support for Ukraine; raising the costs of providing that support; and attempting to make NATO look powerless.
[/QUOTE]
And of course there've been "suspicious" cable cuts in the Baltic Sea and other European waters ....
https://www.economist.com/europe/2026/09/21/russias-grey-zon...
So of course if the FAA is going to put AI into the watchtowers, they're obviously going to use local AI and not rely on some random Amazon cloud infra in some middle eastern country.
right. of course, no ones going to cut corners on the safe use of AI and secure infrastructure in this administration.
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