alt Hacker NewsBuilding 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.
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dgellow • today at 7:55 PM
I’m pretty sure that type of project is contracted to the private sector and isn’t caused by government technologists in any way…
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They had two diverse paths, but apparently did not have a (reliable?) process for ensuring the backup path was functional during fail-over. I imagine there will be some soul-searching over that.
Nothing I've ever seen or experienced with FAA indicates a lack of care; the parsimonious explanation is almost always that people who care a great deal are working within complex systems that don't always have a consistent or externally legible set of priorities. Or more intuitively, the failures we see are the "acceptable" ones versus the unacceptable ones (like planes falling out of the sky).