alt Hacker NewsThe explanation could hold water, but that only demonstrates plausibility, not truth.
Seems that a router that previously terminated copper interfaces was switched to terminate fiber. That alone doesn't really tell us much without knowing whether this is really all that happened or if it's shorthand for a bigger move at a higher level in the protocol stack. For example you might "just" have changed copper Cat6 ports to fiber/SFP but still be doing GigEthernet and I rather doubt that a move that simple could make a router misbehave.
Moving up the stack this get more interesting. For example they might have moved from a copper star topology to a fiber ring, and rings need care or else chaos ensues. Similarly Ethernet gets pissy if there are loops but the spanning tree protocols need very careful usage. I assume since the word router was used that Ethernet was fine and we are in layer 3. An interface switch could have triggered recalculation or reannouncement of routes, for example by erroneously configured routing protocols. eg the Arkansas router announces it is the best hop for traffic to reach Chicago, gets swamped with traffic from Dallas, NY, etc, and falls over. (Yes, the tools provide guardrails. Who knows if they were enabled?)
However, and esp because Duffy is pointing at L3Harris, I suspect they installed (or perhaps removed) a Juniper TDM to Ethernet converter module (eg DS3 SmartSFP from that vendor) and something went bad. These modules are supposed to encap TDM into Ethernet but they don't (iirc) have any semantic awareness of a telephone call, so if they were to be hit by, say, a storm of TDM circuit messages (call setups, say) they might just pass them on, not rate limit them like a true telco packet switch would.
It might be pure coincidence that an AI system was hooked up to the FAA system the week before.
Bottom line: could be bad luck, could be basic screw up, we won't know for years.
This reads very human but "that only demonstrates plausibility, not truth." reads AI ;) Are you imitating ChatGPT? :-) But I agree. This could be a routing issue or some other interaction. Could also just be overload of traffic between these networks of different capabilities. At you say, probably not rate limited in the interface between the systems.
It's not hard to screw up networks. I remember our IT person introducing a loop into a simple office network that took like two hours to troubleshoot.
You'd think they would have a) noticed sooner b) made the connection between the last change and the issues. But easy to be a backseat quarterback as they say.