* There is supposed to be a primary and a secondary link, in this case the primary failed and the fail-over also failed. It's unclear from the reporting if they were damaged in the same incident or if the failover was not tested or monitored adequately.
The Philadelphia TRACON site has been notoriously unreliable and was supposedly improved in 2025, it's also unclear if these issue actually could stem from that implementation.
First big oops of this form that I remember:
"In December 1986, the ARPANET had 7 dedicated trunk lines between NY and Boston, except that they all went through the same conduit -- which was accidentally cut by a backhoe. "
In any system where both sides of redundancy always carry traffic then loss of one link can cause congestion failure if any link fails. This is a very common means of failure in electrical networks that requires load shedding. Well, you can't load shed air traffic.
A more complex system that I like, but comes with it's own set of constraints and implementation issues is a system where both lines carry all the traffic at all times. This way the default state of the system is always working and your first failure isn't invisibly critical.
But this is very hard as we see in TCP when things get out of order and high latency creeps in. You have to manage a lot more state at the data level.
That seems like an extremely foolhardy thing to do.
It seems like it would present a less-chaotic solution than that provided by having no data communications at all.