Flights were halted at several major Northeast airports Monday after a series of technology failures.
Officials said a telecommunications circuit at a facility overseeing Philadelphia International Airport failed Monday afternoon, leading to the discovery that a critical backup fiber line in New Jersey had been accidentally cut. U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said on X that an Amtrak construction crew accidentally cut through the cable.
The issue forced ground stops at some of the nation’s busiest airports, including New York-JFK, LaGuardia, Newark, New Jersey, and Philadelphia. Hundreds of flights were canceled or delayed, and the massive disruption quickly caused backups at other airports in the region, including Boston.
As of 4 p.m., almost 5,000 flights into, out of, or within the U.S. had been delayed and over 800 were canceled, though not all were directly connected to the outage. The problem was most acute at Newark, where almost half of all flights scheduled for Monday were canceled.
Duffy said around 3 p.m. that flights were resuming at Philadelphia and LaGuardia, while flights into JFK, Newark, and Teterboro Airport in New Jersey remained paused.
The FAA is encouraging travelers to check the status of their flight with their airline.
FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford told reporters that the initial circuit that failed is one of the old L3 Verizon circuits that his agency is currently in the process of replacing as part of a broader multibillion-dollar ATC modernization push. He confirmed that the outage took place at the Philadelphia TRACON.
The construction accident damaged about 600 feet of fiber between Brunswick, New Jersey, and Newark, Bedford said. The accident happened Monday but wasn’t noticed until the circuit failure in Philadelphia.
It will likely take around 13 hours to fix the cable, Bedford added, calling the coming repair “massive.”
