A severed backup fiber line in New Jersey knocked out Northeast air traffic control for hours, delaying or canceling thousands of flights and sparking a blame game.
It's crazy that there wasn't greater redundancy to prevent such a widespread fallout for so many hours. Hardly any planes flying around NYC yesterday. Glad they're recovering, but not great for all affected.
If we had a rule like EU261, even though statutory compensation would likely not be included here ('extraordinary circumstance'), at least the duty of care would apply (think, meals, hotels, more rebooking options). Instead, these folks get nothing. Kick rocks. Pound sand. Fly kite.
@samar Ben finally covered it!
It’s really embarrassing one would assumed for such a critical infrastructure they would have 4 to 5 different fiber runs coming into the facility from different directions.
The finger pointing is just a distraction. Construction crews accidentally damage utilities all the time (heck, my internet was out for 3 days for something identical to this!), thats why critical infrastructure is supposed to have redundancy. If the primary circuit had already failed and one severed backup cable can then bring air traffic across much of the northeast to a standstill for eight hours, I’d love to hear how that became a single point of failure rather than whose excavator found it.
Lack of redundant systems therefore a cutting of a line turns into a real cluster. Government at it's finest.
Good thing we moved EWR ATC to Philadelphia for staffing reasons. But it's ok because instead of addressing the staffing problems the FAA announced their new "Smart" AI initiative yesterday as well. Sigh.