Thought you had a bad Monday? A construction crew accidentally cut a Verizon fiber-optic cable, leading to over 150 flight diversions and hundreds more cancellations.
The mishap caused an air traffic control outage at a Philadelphia facility that manages flights in the northeast. A circuit there had failed, and authorities then discovered that the backup cable had been cut, said Bryan Bedford, who leads the Federal Aviation Administration.
New Jersey Transit said its contractors were working about 10 feet from utility markings, and it was trying to determine whether Verizon or the contractors had made the markings.
A Business Insider analysis of Flightradar24 data found 165 flights bound for Newark, LaGuardia, John F. Kennedy, and Philadelphia Airports diverted elsewhere on Monday.
Newark Airport bore the brunt of the chaos: 109 diverted flights were scheduled to land there. Around 20 headed to each of the other three.
Washington, DC, was the most common city that pilots re-routed to, with 22 airplanes diverting to Dulles International Airport. Meanwhile, 10 flights ended up at Lehigh Valley, a small domestic airport near Allentown, Pennsylvania.
Not pictured above are another five flights from Europe that returned to their origins — often referred to as flights to nowhere.
Passengers on Lufthansa Flight 412 spent eight hours on board an Airbus A350 that U-turned over the Atlantic before returning to Munich. And a TAP Air Portugal flight from Porto to Newark was about halfway across the ocean before it was also forced to turn around.
United Airlines appeared to be the worst affected by Monday’s outage, as Newark is one of its major hubs.
Data from FlightAware showed it canceled 361 flights — 11% of its schedule — and almost 800 were delayed.
American Airlines was also hit hard, with over 100 cancellations and 1,300 delays, excluding its subsidiaries that operate regional flights.
About five hours after the chaos began, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy posted on X, saying the telecom lines had been repaired and airport operations were resuming.
Although with many airplanes and flight crews left out of place, airline schedules still faced minor disruption on Tuesday morning, with a few dozen cancellations at Newark.
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