Fibre cable cut in New Jersey disrupts air traffic across US northeast

A circuit failure at the air traffic control facility handling arrivals and departures for the Philadelphia region disrupted air traffic across the northeastern United States. A backup connection was also out of service: a construction crew working for the rail company Amtrak had accidentally cut the fibre optic line that link relied on in New Jersey.

By Monday evening, more than 5,600 flights in the United States had been affected, about 1,200 of them in the New York area. Roughly 90 flights were diverted. Among them was Lufthansa flight LH400, an Airbus A340-600 that landed unexpectedly in Boston before continuing to New York.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said on X that the loss of telecommunications links forced the FAA to pause flights in the northeast for a time. Newark, New York JFK, LaGuardia, Philadelphia and Teterboro were among the airports affected. Traffic had since been partially restored.

Newark was hit hardest, with 267 departing and 257 arriving flights delayed by the evening. Average delays in Philadelphia at times exceeded three hours. The damaged cable belongs to the telecommunications company Verizon, which confirmed to CNN that construction workers had exposed and cut the fibre line running along an Amtrak rail route.