Two routers failed, taking FAA remote facilities in Texas and Arkansas directly offline. L3Harris’s CEO personally came out to say they were running diagnostic tests at the company’s Florida headquarters. For a problem like this, engineers from Juniper and Cisco were all called in to help. Keep in mind that remote air traffic control facilities typically handle communications, navigation, and surveillance data relays. Their availability requirements are often on the order of 99.999%, with no more than five minutes of downtime a year; hot standby redundancy is standard. When both units fail at once, it often points to a configuration error, software defect, or supply-chain batch issue. A similar FAA NOTAM system failure in 2023 briefly grounded flights across the U.S. and delayed thousands of flights. The investigation afterward also traced the problem from edge devices all the way to core systems. Honestly, this is the reality of infrastructure. No one thinks about it under normal circumstances, but when something breaks, it draws nationwide attention. With routers, one failing is an incident; two failing is a systemic risk. Contractors like L3Harris hold the critical equipment air traffic control depends on, usually hidden away in procurement contracts and maintenance agreements until something goes wrong and they get named. After all this time, position sizing is always more important than calling the direction—and that applies to hardware too: if you don’t have enough redundancy, even getting the direction right is useless. Save this assessment for now and come back tomorrow to check it. How long do you think it takes to identify the root cause of a failure involving equipment at this level?