Departing flights out of area airports resume after ground stop from circuit failure caused by cut cable
A plane takes off at La Guardia airport. Flights out of the tri-state area are beginning to resume Monday afternoon after they were halted for several hours because of a power circuit failure, federal officials said Monday. Credit: Newsday/Alejandra Villa Loarca
Flights out of the tristate area continue to be heavily delayed Monday evening because of an equipment outage, according to the FAA.
Airports up and down the northeast were shuttered beginning around 10 a.m. Monday, including John F Kennedy International Airport, LaGuardia and Newark because of a failed circuit and a cut in a fiber line, according to FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford.
Shortly before 3 p.m. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said on X that flights were resuming out of LaGuardia and Philadelphia but that flights arriving at JFK, Newark and Teterboro remain paused.
The FAA said on its website Monday evening that departures to both JFK were grounded until 6:30 p.m. "due to equipment outage" and until 6:15 p.m. at LaGuardia.
Bedford told reporters Monday that the issue was caused when an old Verizon circuit shared by the airports failed, causing all of its data to be lost, and crews discovered a break in that backup fiber cable somewhere between Newark and New Brunswick.
Verizon denied the FAA's claim that its circuit failed.
“We have a fiber cable running adjacent to an Amtrak rail line in New Jersey," the company told Newsday in a statement. "Construction contractors working in the area dug up and cut our cable. Verizon’s facilities were fully functional up to that point. Verizon bears no responsibility for this incident."
Verizon said it "immediately deployed our technicians to the scene. We and our partners are actively working to repair the damaged cable and restore connectivity as quickly as possible.
In his post, Duffy had said "an Amtrak construction crew accidentally cut into a fiber line in New Jersey, which caused a telecom outage."
The new circuit, he said, was installed and would be operational by 1:30 p.m. Replacing the fiber break, Bedford said, would take about 13 hours.
Robert Brodsky is a breaking news reporter who has worked at Newsday since 2011. He is a Queens College and American University alum.
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