Ask HN: Radar and radio failures at Dallas area airports

37 points by pdonner ↗ HN
Anyone have any clue what the cause of this disruption was/is and if it's still going on?

8 comments

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So far it appears the news is reporting a cyber attack in Europe that is affecting European boarding. The RADAR/RADIO (TRACON) thing in Texas and other major airports in the US. A cyber attack on Collins Aerospace and Frontier. And some blame pointing at L3Harris for inadequate failure recovery. Sounds like no one has a clue. I wonder if any of our security apparatus is still functioning enough to provide support to find the source of the problem.
Somebody completely forgot about high availability and redundancy.
It would be interesting to know the who and how of the fiber cut. We're a tiny company in the heartland and have seen two separate fiber cuts in different parts of the state. Both tickets indicated that they were believed to be malicious, intentional cuts. In one case, fiber was cut in two places many hundreds of meters apart.

What may be outdated here is our trust in humans to not destroy critical parts of our infrastructure.

In my neck of the woods, we have mostly aerial fiber and not a lot of redundancy, so I hear about a lot of of fiber cuts. In the past several years we've had a lot of wires downed by trees, a couple by cars running into poles, several cuts that seem like intentional cuts --- usually attributed to people cutting lines to try to steal copper, a couple times people shooting down cables cause shooting things is fun; and then we also have tree trimmers that trim the fiber instead, and we also had an underwater cable taken out by someone driving a piling in the wrong place (I've seen a report saying the place not to disturb was clearly marked).

Outside plant is basically indefensible, so if you can't trust humans not to destroy it, you've got problems.

What speaks volumes is that such a serious incident is not more widely reporting in a mainstream media that normally loves fear mongering.
Sounds like the start of the Die Hard 2 movie