On September 21, a fiber outage supporting US air-traffic control operations caused significant disruptions across major East Coast airports when the primary communications circuit failed and the designated backup circuit was found to have been previously damaged by construction activity. The incident exposed how a seemingly localized network failure can quickly cascade into broad operational disruption, impacting airlines, passengers, supply chains, government operations, and the broader economy.
While major carrier IT collapses — such as Southwest’s 2022 meltdown and Delta’s 2024 outage — have historically proven that it takes airlines roughly 5–7 days and hundreds of millions (or even over a billion dollars) to recover from system failures, this air traffic control event demonstrates that the vulnerability extends right to the backbone of the national airspace itself. It is a stark reminder that redundancy alone does not guarantee resilience; backup infrastructure must be operational, diverse, tested, and continuously monitored to perform when it is needed most.
For critical infrastructure sectors such as aviation, network resilience is not simply a technology objective; it is a business outcome that directly affects operations, customer experience, safety, and revenue. What can business and technology leaders learn from this event, and how can they better prepare their organizations for the next network disruption?
- Treat networks as business assets, not just IT infrastructure. Forrester’s business-optimized networking research emphasizes that networks are no longer passive transport systems. They directly support customer experience, employee productivity, revenue generation, operational resilience, and business innovation. When a network fails, the business fails. Organizations must therefore align network investments with business outcomes, treating connectivity as a strategic asset rather than an operational expense.
- Integrate network resilience into business continuity planning and tighten SLAs. Business continuity plans must explicitly account for network dependencies, failover procedures, and realistic recovery scenarios through routine tabletop simulations of carrier and facility outages. Crucially, organizations must recognize that a few hours of network downtime can trigger days of operational paralysis — meaning that traditional network SLAs must be rewritten to align tightly with real-world business outcomes and recovery speeds.
- Build true resilience through diverse, active-active architectures. Traditional dual-circuit setups are no longer enough if both paths share the same underlying vulnerability. Organizations should adopt a multi-underlay approach — combining fiber, cellular, fixed wireless, and satellite — paired with modern SD-WAN or SASE overlay technologies. This combination delivers real-time network visibility and active-active routing, automatically steering traffic away from compromised paths (such as construction-damaged lines) to keep business operations seamlessly online.
Incidents like this remind us that network resilience is not a technical requirement alone; it is a business resilience requirement. If you’d like to discuss how to align networking strategy with business outcomes, resilience, and continuity objectives, submit an inquiry to inquiry@forrester.com and schedule a conversation with Andre Kindness or Octavio Garcia Granados.
