In the age of satellites and artificial intelligence , it is hard to imagine that air traffic controllers could lose radar images and contact with aircraft for about 90 seconds due to a malfunction in an old communications infrastructure, but that is what happened at a center directing flights to Newark Liberty Airport in the United States in April 2025.
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This incident revealed that sectors upon which the lives of millions depend are still using hardware and software systems, parts of which were designed before the spread of the internet, smartphones, and cloud computing.
Hospital imaging and patient monitoring equipment may remain tied to operating systems that are no longer supported, and centralized systems continue to manage flights and air traffic at airports despite the difficulty of maintaining them, while banks and governments still use programming instructions written in programming languages dating back to the 1960s.
But these systems still exist because they are still working, and because replacing them could itself be a high-risk process.
Old systems, but they still work
The term legacy systems is used to describe the technical condition of systems, applications, or devices that continue to operate after the manufacturer has stopped supporting them, when they are difficult to update, or when they rely on hardware, programming languages, and protocols that are no longer widely used.
These older systems are not useless or unusable; they may be stable and reliable after decades of testing and operation. However, they are often linked to a wide range of hardware and software, so changing one part of them may affect other processes that are no longer adequately documented.
The problem is most evident in medical equipment, which may have a lifespan of many years, while the operating system or commercial software it relies on has a shorter lifespan.
Previous studies and technical reports have shown that some medical imaging devices continued to operate on old operating systems, such as "Windows XP", at a time when the producing company had stopped providing security patches for them.
Therefore, organizations find themselves facing a difficult choice: to keep the old, well-known, stable system that performs its function, or to move to a new system that requires data transfer, compatibility testing, rebuilding interfaces, and ensuring that the processes associated with it are not disrupted.
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