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.

> 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?

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.

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 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.

On the same day they interduce AI flight controllers? [1]

Press X for doubt.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2026/09/21/nx-s1-5976816/faa-ai-manage-a...

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)

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...

ATC seems like a great place to have redundancy with a starlink dish on the roof.

I thought Musk got an FAA telecom contract for Starlink back when he was effectively running the government (or at least running it into the ground)?

https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/25/business/musk-faa-starlink-co...

Well.. ATC in the north of the Uk was down today as well. Fun.

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.

If/when civilization collapses, flights will be the first thing to go

Just sayin

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.

[flagged]

[flagged]

[flagged]

[flagged]

Are we sure this wasn't Claude? Has Dario made an announcement yet?

Maybe Sean Duffy was just binge-watching his old reality tv shows and gobbled up the bandwidth?