Newark Airport 90‑second radar outage linked to legacy system; GAO flags aging federal IT
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In April 2025 Newark Liberty Airport lost radar and aircraft communication for about 90 seconds because of a fault in an old communication infrastructure, and the US Office of Government Accountability reviewed 69 legacy systems from 24 federal agencies, identifying 11 as most in need of update.
The reviewed systems range in age from roughly 23 to 60 years, cost about 754 million dollars annually to operate and maintain, include eight that use obsolete programming languages, four that rely on unsupported hardware, software or operating systems, and seven that have known security vulnerabilities; the US government spends more than 100 billion dollars per year on IT and cybersecurity, with roughly 80 % allocated to operating and maintaining existing systems rather than developing new ones.