It happens. There use to be a joke during the first big DC build out phase that went like if you're ever going into the wilderness take a 1ft length of fiber optic cable with you. If you get lost bury it and a back hoe operator will appear and sever it within an hour. You can get a ride back with them.
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.
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?
back in the day, i worked for Energis (#3 wholesale telco in the UK) … we had about 2.2m active subscribers and ran a fibre backbone.
one day the backbone (E1 bidirectional ring iirc) was broken north of london … my boss drove out to find that travellers had entered the field, opened the inspection cover in the ground, stood a pole for their clothes line and filled with cement
very savvy, he didn’t let on that we had about £1m revenue per day close to collapse and convinced them to hang their clothes somewhere else (perhaps a few quid changed hands)
Finding out your backup fiber has been cut, aparently some time
ago, only when you try to use it as the backup isn’t an issue of “aging infrastructure.” It’s an issue of letting completely incompetent people run your tech.
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 ....
Nobody listens to the system engineer until exactly the thing he warned about happens. They still don't listen to him after it happens but at least he can feel smug for a day
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.
The UK ATC system was down again today for the second time this month. I'm no conspiracy theorist but hard to believe those two + this are 'accidents'. I believe the Netherlands has also had several issues recently.
US halts flights at busy East Coast airports, says fiber line cut
(reuters.com)222 points by allanbreyes 16 hours ago | 131 comments
Comments
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 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.
https://www.airwaysmag.com/new-post/faa-smart-first-deployme...
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?
one day the backbone (E1 bidirectional ring iirc) was broken north of london … my boss drove out to find that travellers had entered the field, opened the inspection cover in the ground, stood a pole for their clothes line and filled with cement
very savvy, he didn’t let on that we had about £1m revenue per day close to collapse and convinced them to hang their clothes somewhere else (perhaps a few quid changed hands)
Press X for doubt.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2026/09/21/nx-s1-5976816/faa-ai-manage-a...
(The actual easiest method is to install the conduit or direct burial cable with tracer wire)
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/25/business/musk-faa-starlink-co...
[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...
right. of course, no ones going to cut corners on the safe use of AI and secure infrastructure in this administration.
Just sayin
In places like these, it's not the best contractor that wins, but the one that supports genocide against Palestinians.