Over the years we've heard a couple things about deep sea cables being torn, and things like that, rendering Internet access to various parts of the world rather bad off, but this one's rather interesting. According to Bitgravity, resident in Silicon Valley woke up this morning rather confused. They had no internet, they had no 911 service, and some people had no TV. "Why?", they asked. Well, it was because somebody had decided that they wanted to cut the cables themselves, using nothing but a hacksaw to do so.
AT&T has put out a press release stating that it was because a fiber cable was cut, but of course, to make the service go out entirely for the affected areas, there had to be several cuts. According to Bitgravity, AT&T employees have actually speculated that the Communications Workers of America Union (CWA) did this themselves. This isn't to be ruled out, actually; the cuts were clean and easy to repair, so perhaps they were after some work. Not only this, but the person (or people) who pulled this off would have to have known where the cables were hidden, inside several manholes. Additionally, all of the cuts were within a short driving distance within one another, indicating it was just one person behind this.
This raises some alarms. The cuts were, thankfully, easy to repair... but it could have been much worse. Why didn't they want to truly destroy the cables? Maybe they were short on time, who knows. If it's that easy to cut a fiber cable that provides communications access to so many people, what would happen if someone decided to pull this off again, on a much larger scale? Truly quite scary, if you start to think about all the possibilities that could arise.
Maybe this will lead to an increase in security when it comes to the fiber cables around the country, and the world, to help prevent this kind of thing from happening again.
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