US halts flights at busy East Coast airports, says fiber line cut

> 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.

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

[delayed]

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)

US used to be capable of deterring aggressive action.

Remove Elon Thiel Trump Vance ASAP

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.

[flagged]

So much for all that work to ensure path diversity. Perhaps it got deleted by Elon's goons grepping for "diversity".

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