Hundreds of flights were cancelled or delayed across the United States on Monday following an accidental severance of a Verizon fibre cable used for air traffic control in New Jersey. The outage caused ground stops at all three major airports serving New York City, highlighting the critical dependence of aviation infrastructure on telecommunications networks. By Monday evening, telecommunications lines had been repaired and airport operations in the Northeast were resuming, though clearing the backlog of delays was expected to take considerable time.

The incident prompted disputes over responsibility, with Verizon claiming construction contractors had cut the cable, US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy attributing the damage to an Amtrak crew, and Amtrak itself blaming a New Jersey Transit contractor. According to FlightAware, over 1,000 flights were cancelled on the day, demonstrating the cascade effect when a single piece of critical infrastructure fails. The circuit failure that led to discovery of the severed cable exposed a vulnerability in the redundancy systems protecting one of the nation's busiest aviation regions.