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last time this happened in my area a local farmer was burying a cow and took out the whole towns connection
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Nest door neighbor did this when he just decided on a whim to put in a new driveway and started digging with a bobcat. 10 mins in and BLAM severed the main Comcast coax serving the entire neighborhood that was running under his driveway.

Luckily we were on Century Link so weren't affected by his stupidity. lol

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Put all your backups in one basket, and then pray that nobody crushes the basket.
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This is a pretty classic network operator story: go to great lengths to provide for physically diverse paths, then not notice when your provider refactors and grooms them onto the same bundle.
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That is negligence, practical if not contractual.

Over ten years ago, my employer was spinning up a new DC across the state and had three links between it and the primary DC. Two were pretty direct, but we needed a third because at one point in the 300 mile path, the two main links went within 400 meters of each other.

So how national-security-adjacent critical systems like an airport system doesn't have a larger set of backup links, and validates that they are geographically separate up until the connections, and have realtime alerting on the connection status, is surprising to me.

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> validates that they are geographically separate up until the connections

This isn't relevant in this case. The problems occurred at different places. The backup fiber was, separately from the issues with the primary system, cut by a construction crew. It's not two fiber lines both cut at the same spot.

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