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>A man stranded in the bush in northern Saskatchewan was rescued last week after chopping down four power poles — knocking out electricity to surrounding communities. [...]
>But he had an axe and he knew SaskPower would have to check the downed line, so he went to work.
Pretty grim that a life critical system wasn't designed to report that the backup fibre was unserviceable until they attempted to switch over to it.
I wonder how long it was down? Days, weeks, months?
A lot of people are incompetent.
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.
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).
Hard to fathom someone still holding that view after the 737MAX disasters.
The NTSB has repeatedly and publicly criticized the FAA for failing to implement their recommendations, including as recently as last week (Amazon Prime crash resulting in 5 deaths). They've explicitly called out the FAA's failure to act as a contributing factor in crashes, multiple times.
Regulatory capture ruined the FAA.
BT guy ends that part of the presentation with "the IRA will really have to get shit together to take you off the net"
This was during the troubles. Same planet, different world.
https://www.airwaysmag.com/new-post/faa-smart-first-deployme...
Good luck to all of us.
one day the backbone (E1 bidirectional ring iirc) was broken north of london … my boss drove out to find that travellers had entered the field, opened the inspection cover in the ground, stood a pole for their clothes line and filled with cement
very savvy, he didn’t let on that we had about £1m revenue per day close to collapse and convinced them to hang their clothes somewhere else (perhaps a few quid changed hands)
Or is it that these ATC networks are their own air-gapped network with less redundancy? That just doesn't add up. Or maybe there was only one line going to the ATC, with no multiple "ISPs" like a datacenter would have?
* There is supposed to be a primary and a secondary link, in this case the primary failed and the fail-over also failed. It's unclear from the reporting if they were damaged in the same incident or if the failover was not tested or monitored adequately.
The Philadelphia TRACON site has been notoriously unreliable and was supposedly improved in 2025, it's also unclear if these issue actually could stem from that implementation.
That seems like an extremely foolhardy thing to do.
It seems like it would present a less-chaotic solution than that provided by having no data communications at all.
(The actual easiest method is to install the conduit or direct burial cable with tracer wire)
And of course there are marker posts that say "buried fiber optic cable do not dig".
[QUOTE:]
Russia has been staging covert operations and deniable provocations against European countries for many years. Since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in 2022 they have increased. These have included incursions by reconnaissance drones, hacking, arson, parcel bombs targeting cargo flights and plots to kill executives of leading European arms firms. In recent months the pace of such shadowy attacks appears to have risen again. The Russian operations have three main goals, according to analysts and security officials: trying to coerce European countries into halting their support for Ukraine; raising the costs of providing that support; and attempting to make NATO look powerless.
[/QUOTE]
And of course there've been "suspicious" cable cuts in the Baltic Sea and other European waters ....
https://www.economist.com/europe/2026/09/21/russias-grey-zon...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43205435 ("Starlink to take over $2.4B contract to overhaul air traffic control comms (theverge.com)")
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/25/business/musk-faa-starlink-co...
right. of course, no ones going to cut corners on the safe use of AI and secure infrastructure in this administration.
Just sayin
With low-enough engineering quality, you don't actually need saboteurs.
While I agree, that’s just what they told us. Not sure I believe it anymore. The fact the first UK one happened immediately after they sanctioned Israel is also just a big coincidence.
Press X for doubt.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2026/09/21/nx-s1-5976816/faa-ai-manage-a...