Gatwick Airport Chaos Blamed on Broken Vodafone Fibre Cable UPDATE

The UK’s second largest airport, which serves 45 million passengers a year on short and long-haul flights, descended into farcical chaos today after a damaged Vodafone fibre optic cable took out the information screens and forced many passengers to get flight updates from hand-drawn white boards.

Gatwick Airport’s cloud-based flight information displays were only recently introduced to replace a dedicated local computer system. Sadly somebody in their IT department must have neglected the need for some redundancy in the new connectivity, which promptly fell flat on its face after one of Vodafone’s fibres took a sick day.

The situation follows hot on the heels of a major 11 hour outage at Carlisle City Council last week, whose connectivity is allegedly managed by Vodafone. In that situation ISPreview.co.uk has been informed that there was a serious loss of internet service across all council sites from around midday on Thursday, which seems to have occurred after engineers decommissioned some legacy equipment in Manchester.

A Gatwick Airport Spokesperson said (Twitter):

“Due to damage to a Vodafone fibre optic cable, we are continuing to display our flight info manually. Contingencies are working – we have whiteboards and friendly staff on hand to help, and tens of thousands of passengers have departed on time. Apologies for any inconvenience.”

A Vodafone Spokesperson said:

“We have identified a damaged fibre cable which is used by Gatwick Airport to display flight information. Our engineers are working hard to fix the cable as quickly as possible. This is a top priority for us and we are very sorry for any problems caused by this issue. We are keeping Gatwick Airport constantly informed of progress.”

Of course savvy travellers won’t be too concerned as these days there are a myriad of different applications that can be used to pull flight information down from the online world. This of course only makes it all the more ridiculous that Gatwick couldn’t rig up a more effective temporary solution.

Apparently the cloud-based information system itself only requires a broadband ISP style connection speed of 3Mbps, so it’s not like they even need a fibre optic cable for the backup.

UPDATE 5:46pm

Apparently other ISPs were also impacted by the fibre problem. The situation appears as if it stemmed from some planned work to repair a fibre joint, which overran by several hours. As we understand it the work initially completed, but the engineers then found that the fibres were also crossed further up from where they had been working.