It’s 50ft of RJ45, Donald. What could it cost? 50 billion dollars?
I am highly skeptical that work on some copper wiring at a remote location could cause a nation-wide communications failure. The people providing this explanation are proven liars and idiots; the people who built our nation-wide communications network were not. This reeks of bullshit.
I don’t disagree but from my understanding the affected areas were O Hare, Newark and a couple other airports. Those are extremely large airports and have flights coming from all over the country. I think they were trying to mitigate any new flights flying over their airpspace without having comms so they grounded everyone.
It was air traffic centers that were affected, not specific airports. All centers were listed as affecred initially, but there were some reports that a couple were still operating. The US has 22 centers in total, around the busiest regions
So one cable caused an outage at all air ports nation wide? Why does that sound like bs
Along with their claim of needing $50 billion to fix it.
That funding request has nothing to do with this incident. It’s a long-standing request
Also, can we please stop complaining about funding maintenance?
There has been so much deferred maintenance, we’re paying a lot extra to try to catch up. We deferred it because people have complained about the cost of maintenance for decades. Please, let’s skip the part where we defer maintenance until people start dying
Because it definitely is. It’s so embarrassing that how much everything about their reasons are bull shit that I don’t even feel like it’s worth the effort to debunk it anymore.
Like, is there anyone out there actually believing the crap they regurgitated?
“It’s not the new AI systems, all they do is provide information (data). They aren’t connected in anyway”
“All we know is that the server infrastructure was overloaded with data”
Like, they added the new AI systems and they ddosed themselves. I’m not quoting directly. But that’s basically what the white house briefing said last night.
This wire crap screams of someone looking for any minor and unrelated problem that occurred yesterday to place blame on. There probably was a construction project that had some problem yesterday. It definitely wasn’t the cause though.
Why does that sound like bs
Because it puts the onus on you to string together a lot of “maybe” and “if” to get something as a workable explanation. IF by “copper wire” they didn’t mean ethernet cable, but instead it was some analog cable, then MAYBE the wire getting cut started getting interpreted as garbage that was going out to a larger network.
There are already a lot of “this is what happened” stories floating around, and they can’t all be true. It is plausible that one thing going wrong at one busy airport would have cascading effects. It happens with weather all the time, and some of those delays last longer than the four hours and change the flights were grounded.
The article says “a contractor for the Federal Aviation Administration was working at a remote location” which doesn’t answer any questions, but opens up a whole lot of other questions. Can a malicious actor just saunter up to the right “remote location” with a pair of wire cutters and ground the whole US? And all of this was on top of SpaceX having debris cause flight issues, AND it was the first day of a test of an AI flight routing program.
The aging ATC system needing to be overhauled is a trope at this point. I can’t ever remember a single comment/anecdote/experience that tilted towards “this is fine and it should stay this way forever,” except for maybe the people with the power of the purse who aren’t accountable for aging infrastructure apparently.
That’s the fun part about old equipment that’s been running for decades. Sometimes when it goes down, it doesn’t come back up.
Edit: also, https://xkcd.com/2347/
Bgp could happen to you.
It’s the WH. They lie all the time.
He said the investigation will determine whether the fault was due to “incompetence” or “a faulty router.”
Definitely incompetence. You’re air traffic control. If that shit wasn’t tested first, if it wasn’t deployed in parallel, if it wasn’t switched back the exact moment you knew something was wrong then I was incompetence. The outage was over 4 hours. A switch back does not take that long unless you’re incompetent.
Also, how the hell does one cable take down there entire network, and if that is your design, why would you advertise that to the world and our adversaries.
It’s insane this admin (with a conservative trifecta for the last 2 years) is pretending it isn’t their fault. “Oh Congress didn’t give us more money!” BS, your party was in charge of congress. Do you really think the Dem’s wouldn’t have helped you pass a clean ATC funding bill the first time you let there be a midair collision?
Stange because Mullins and Duffy made it sound like they unleashed their data hog AI and it flooded the old switches and DoS’d themselves.
This is the story I want to be true, that somewhere in the system there’s a protocol that’s exactly so many bits and no more which worked fine for when it was designed, and AI slop masters rolled up and starting shoving JSON over that infrastructure.
I will laugh my ass off if the infrastructure only gets upgraded due to six months of whining by the AI crowd overpowering the last decades of all the first hand human reports from people who work in/with/around the ATC system. Here’s hoping we eventually get a congress stupid enough to fall for the arugment that all our crumbling bridges need to be rebuilt because we can’t transport heavy AI equipment over them.
I also hear that for AI to streamline the healthcare system that we need more rural hospitals and more pay for nurses. Likewise AI can’t bring the cost of education down without paying teachers more. We can’t get AI to the schools unless every school is connected to a high speed top of the line fiber network!
If only there would be a way to prevent a single point of failure for critical infrastructure.
Yeah. I don’t belive them.
ATC computers and comms are old. Super old. They’re also critical systems. The effort that we put into security today is dwarfed by the effort they put into redundancy and resilience for critical systems back in the day. It was incredibly insecure, but it could work through a nuclear war.
One wire taking it down suggests that it’s new equipment or the redundancy has not been maintained. Or both.
Very poetic if we based the cyber requirements off the old cold war “survive a nuclear strike” requirements, then misapplied those new requirements to the old systems (à la can’t run Windows Defender if the system doesn’t use Windows) causing new infrastructure to be added that caused the whole system to fail.
Nationwide? Were they all replacing at the same time or are all US airports completely dependent on a central server?
Was that one wire used to plug the system into the new AI bullshit they were installing? Otherwise I’m calling BS on this. The entire thing seems like a cover for something. There was probably never a technical issue to begin with, they did it for another reason entirely(legit immediate threat from Iran, to try and extort 50 billion, etc)
I’ve got this paranoid idea that it was dress rehearsal.
Ahh, no it’s part of the plan. Project 2025, pages 632 and 633. They want to separate flight control from the FAA to privatize it so they can skim off the top
Wasn’t DOGE unleashed over FAA as well?
Sure Jan, sure
