A severed Verizon fiber optic cable along New Jersey's Amtrak rail corridor knocked out the FAA's backup data link to a regional air traffic control center on Monday, disrupting hundreds of flights across the Northeast and forcing three international United Airlines services into diversions to Albany International Airport.

The FAA told reporters that the primary circuit feeding data into the facility failed first. When technicians tried to route traffic to the redundant line, they found it had been cut by construction crews. Verizon confirmed contractors had dug up and severed the cable and said technicians were "racing to get the cable fixed."

Three United flights bound for Newark Liberty from Europe — two from France and one from Italy — landed instead at Albany, well north of their intended destination. The French inbound services originated at Paris Charles de Gaulle and Nice. The Italian service departed Rome Fiumicino. A domestic Delta Air Lines shuttle from LaGuardia to Boston diverted to Albany initially, then pushed back out after the airport held the aircraft briefly.

What does the outage actually break?

The combined failure of the primary circuit and the severed redundant line knocked out the data backbone serving Philadelphia International alongside New York Kennedy, LaGuardia and Newark Liberty. By early Monday afternoon, the FAA reported that some operations had resumed at LaGuardia and Philadelphia. Persistent delays were expected into the evening.

The episode renewed scrutiny on the redundancy of FAA telecommunications infrastructure. A single severed fiber running alongside an active passenger rail corridor deprived one regional facility of its failover path — a pattern that resurfaces whenever commercial utilities share rights-of-way with rail operators.

Which carriers and routes were affected?

• Three United Airlines long-haul services from Paris, Nice and Rome, all Newark-bound, diverted to Albany.
• A Delta Air Lines LaGuardia–Boston shuttle initially diverted to Albany, then resumed.
• Philadelphia International and the three New York metro airports ran reduced arrival rates through midday.
• Several airlines opened fee-free rebooking to stranded passengers, the FAA said.

Why Albany?

Albany International sits north of Newark and serves as a designated diversion field for the saturated New York metro hubs. Its capacity to absorb widebody overflow was visible Monday as two transatlantic Boeing 777-class operations and a 767-class Rome service landed on its single commercial runway.

What did operators tell passengers?

Verizon, in a statement attributed to its technicians, said crews were "racing to get the cable fixed." The FAA directed travelers to check flight status with their carriers before heading to the airport — a routine instruction that underscored how little centralized information controllers had to share during the disruption.

What's the operational fallout?

A Northeast traffic program that funnels arrivals into EWR, JFK, LGA and PHL typically handles thousands of daily movements. Even partial throttles of that network translate into misconnected passengers, crew positioning problems and aircraft stuck out of base for the next morning's bank. Fee-free rebooking policies at multiple carriers will compound the financial hit through the week.

Expect the FAA and Verizon to publish root-cause findings in the days ahead; the open question is whether the next severed backhoe strike on a single rail-corridor fiber triggers the same cascade.