A single cut fiber cable knocked out FAA air traffic systems and grounded hundreds of flights on Monday.
Construction crews in New Jersey accidentally severed a Verizon fiber cable used for air traffic control communications. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said a circuit failure first alerted controllers to the problem, which was traced back to the severed line. The outage triggered ground stops at all three major New York City airports and delayed flights across the Northeast. Verizon says it bears "no responsibility," pointing instead to the "construction contractors working in the area" who "dug up and cut our cable."
The incident is a reminder that America's air traffic control network can be grounded by a backhoe as easily as by a cyberattack or a software bug. Verizon's insistence that the fault lies with contractors, not its own network, is a distinction that will matter little to the passengers who spent Monday stuck at the gate.
For a system that can seize up nationwide over one severed line, air traffic control has remarkably little redundancy to spare.