Thread

1. atonse · 1790016937 · focus · HN ↗

   I don't quite understand this sort of thing happening. Wasn't the whole point of the internet to be a self-healing network where we route around severed cables, etc?

   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?

   1. bri3d · 1790017634 · focus · HN ↗

      * Yes, TRACON have their own dedicated links. You can look into ASTERIX and STARS to learn some of the cursed ways the data processing and dataflow work.

      * 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.

      1. wrs · 1790018179 · focus · HN ↗

         I’ve had enough double-redundant links fail - and I mean pretty thoroughly double-redundant, different provider, different media, different physical path - that I’m quite surprised something like the air traffic control system only has two links.

         1. Polizeiposaune · 1790020336 · focus · HN ↗

            Contractually dual-path, or actually dual-path? My understanding is that there's enough infrastructure horse-trading going on behind the scenes that it's very difficulty to be certain that two circuits between points A and B don't share the same infrastructure somewhere in between.

            First big oops of this form that I remember:

            "In December 1986, the ARPANET had 7 dedicated trunk lines between NY and Boston, except that they all went through the same conduit -- which was accidentally cut by a backhoe. "

            <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.csl.sri.com&#x2F;~neumann&#x2F;insiderisks06.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.csl.sri.com&#x2F;~neumann&#x2F;insiderisks06.html

            1. wrs · 1790030338 · focus · HN ↗

               I&#x27;m talking about data not able to leave the building, not even data getting lost on the way.

               One example was a site that had fiber and coax, from different companies. They might have shared a pipe at some point along their length, hard to say. But both connections went down at the same time for digital reasons, not physical. The providers had simultaneous unrelated backend router problems and the site lost contact to both gateways.

               This was with a nice SD-WAN system that routed everything dynamically across both pipes to address latency and errors, but if the packets get dropped at the first hop in both networks, there&#x27;s not much you can do!

               The saving grace in that case was the third redundant connection, a 4G cell modem, with a lot less bandwidth but able to keep the critical transactions going. These days I&#x27;d certainly want Starlink on the roof as well.

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.