That was the backup connection. The primary failed, and concurrently the backup had been severed by a construction crew.
No one notices the thousands of times the redundant links works just fine. We only notice when the primary has an outage and a construction crew cuts a fiber line at the same time.
A more useful comment might have been to say something about the depth of the backup, having only one backup connection not being enough or something.
I have literally spraypainted the pavement and wall - "One fibre goes here, and down on the corner there, the other fibre goes there" - just to ensure a good separation of routes. I want the pinch point to be within the rack that the routers sit in.
I don't get why an airport can't do similar.
So they didnt have a redundant connection. They had 1 live one that was severed.
Redundancy is always having more than one live connection.