Construction crews in New Jersey severed the line, grounding flights at all three major New York City airports, with delays ongoing.

Construction crews in New Jersey accidentally cut a Verizon fiber cable used for air traffic control on Monday, prompting ground stops at all three major New York City airports and disrupting hundreds of flights across the Northeast. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said a circuit failure led to the discovery of the severed line.

Verizon told CNBC that it bears no responsibility, blaming construction contractors who dug up and cut its cable. US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said an Amtrak crew cut the line, but Amtrak blamed a New Jersey Transit contractor, and New Jersey Transit owns the property where the incident occurred.

The outage shows how a single fiber cut can cascade through systems that operators treat as separate, because air traffic control depends on commercial telecom lines laid along rail corridors. Teams running critical services should map which third-party routes their uptime relies on and how fast a cut can be traced and repaired.

As of Monday evening, Duffy said the telecom lines had been repaired and that airport operations in the Northeast were resuming, though he cautioned that clearing existing delays would take time. FlightAware counted more than 1,000 canceled flights in the United States that day, and the dispute over which crew cut the line remains unresolved.

What matters

• Construction crews cut a Verizon fiber cable in New Jersey, causing ground stops at New York airports.
• Single points of failure in fiber routing can ground air traffic nationwide, a risk operators rarely model.
• Watch whether Verizon, Amtrak, and New Jersey Transit resolve blame, and how quickly flight delays clear.

Why it matters

Watch whether Verizon, Amtrak, and New Jersey Transit resolve blame, and how quickly flight delays clear.

This GenAI News article was prepared in original wording using reporting and materials published by The Verge. Source reference: https://www.theverge.com/transportation/998550/a-cut-cable-disrupted-hundreds-of-flights-across-the-us.

Drafted by the GenAI News review pipeline.