Telecom Failure Closes Philly and NYC Airports
A History Lesson and How You Can Prepare
One of the last things infrastructure and data center pros want to see a phrase like “aging circuit and backup system failure” and that it caused a “meltdown” but that’s straight from the real world CNN headline on Monday, September 21 . Connectivity failures triggered ground stops at several airports in our region, including Philadelphia International Airport as well as the New York-area airports LaGuardia, JFK International, Newark, and Teterboro.
In all, hundreds of thousands of travelers were inconvenienced by over 7,000 flights that were delayed and canceled, and not just at Philly and NYC airports, as spillover in the region impacted other airports in places like Boston, where Logan Airport saw more than 480 delays and 70 cancellations.
How did this happen? The primary circuit failed in the FAA’s Philadelphia facility. But failover to backup systems couldn’t occur, as a railroad construction crew in New Jersey (pictured) had inadvertently severed the fiber to that system.
Railroads being involved in a damaging telecom snafu is not rare.. Railroad rights-of-way are attractive for use as telecom fiber pathways, but they are active operations, maintenance, and construction areas. Notably, this incident is reminiscent to the damage to the interconnection ecosystem by the Holland Street Fire in Baltimore in July 2001, where a train derailment and subsequent blaze cast a blight on both Mid-Atlantic and trans-Atlantic communications for more than 36 hours. So many telecom companies using the same corridors along rail lines and highways like I-95 can add to the risk of downtime, even for those companies that have multiple carriers.
There are many different risks that can cause downtime, with valuable lessons to be learned from past disruptions. We talked about the Holland Street fire and six more recent outage-inducing challenges in our white paper Maintaining High Availability: Nine Critical Steps to Take for Disaster Recovery Success.
Unfortunately, mistakes outside of your organization’s control, storms, ransomware, and just plain bad luck can lead to downtime that can do lasting damage to your business, your customer relationships, and your reputation for availability and reliability. Read our white paper today. for ideas (and reminders) on how you can protect your organization from downtime damage.