Heavy delays at area airports after ground stops 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
Travelers flying out of Kennedy and LaGuardia airports late Monday continued to see delays because of an earlier equipment outage, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.
Both airports, along with others in the northeast, were shuttered beginning about 10 a.m. Monday. The grounding of flights at both Kennedy and LaGuardia, as well as at Newark Liberty International Airport, was due 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 flights arriving at Kennedy, Newark and Teterboro, in New Jersey, remained paused.
The FAA said on its website Monday evening that departures at Kennedy were grounded until 6:30 p.m. "due to equipment outage," and until 6:15 p.m. at LaGuardia. After the ground stops, delays of more than an hour plagued both airports. About 8 p.m., delays eased to 25 minutes for flights out of Kennedy, according to FlightAware, a flight tracking website.
About 6 p.m., Duffy said the telecom lines were repaired, but it would "take some time to clear all existing delays."
Bedford told reporters Monday 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, New Jersey.
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.
Newsday's Nicholas Grasso contributed to this story.
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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