What we know about the FAA outage disrupting thousands of flights across the Northeast

A broken circuit is affecting thousands of flights in the Northeast.

Gary Hershorn/Getty Images Airports across the Northeast are experiencing disruptions after an air traffic control outage.

Newark, JFK, LaGuardia, Teterboro, and Philadelphia airports have all been affected.

An Amtrak construction crew accidentally cut a backup fiber line, leading to the outage.

A construction mishap affecting air traffic control equipment in New Jersey on Monday has caused chaos for travelers flying through the Northeast — and the disruptions are piling up.

New Jersey's Newark Liberty International Airport has been under a ground stop since around 10 a.m., when a nearby air traffic control center experienced an equipment outage, forcing the Federal Aviation Administration to halt inbound flights.

The outage has since affected Philadelphia and New York's JFK and LaGuardia airports, with hundreds of flights delayed, diverted, or canceled.

Newark has been hit hardest so far, with about 500 departing and arriving flights canceled — over a third of all scheduled operations.

LaGuardia and JFK have seen only a handful of cancellations, but nearly 300 have been delayed at each.

About 100 flights have been canceled in Philadelphia, with about another 250 delayed.

FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford told CBS News around 1 p.m. that the primary circuit, which was old and due for replacement, failed, and that about 600 feet of the backup fiber was accidentally cut out by a construction crew.

He said the backup could take half a day to repair, but the primary circuit would take about 30 minutes.

About an hour later, the FAA told CBS News that the fix didn't work.

The affected ATC facility is the Philadelphia Terminal Radar Approach Control, or TRACON, which manages arriving and departing aircraft in the area.