> 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?

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

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.

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)

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.

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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?