TechWag

Try explaining this one to your boss, but a fiber optic line was shot at near Cleveland Ohio, that caused disruptions to some service providers in the northern United States. Usually it is someone with a backhoe that has gone digging and cut a fiber line somewhere, but this is the first time that we know of that there was damage to fiber optics because someone was shooting at it. Computer World reports that:

TeliaSonera AB, which lost the northern leg of its U.S. network to the cut, said that the outage began around 4 p.m. EDT Sunday. When technicians pulled up the affected cable, it appeared to have been shot. “Somebody had been shooting with a gun or a shotgun into the cable,” said Anders Olausson, a TeliaSonera spokesman. The damage affected a large span of cable, more than two-thirds of a mile long, near Cleveland, TeliaSonera said. Source: Computer World

One blog reporter “That Geeky Dude” reports that his service was also having issues, and goes into more detail about the outage. Cogent and Level 3 all reported additional issues throughout the day, as they tried to fix the issue, and while initial ownership was disputed, eventually it has to be fixed.

This is one outage that is going to be hard to explain to management, and if it were not for the Internet Health Report, and other articles detailing the issue, most management would not believe that someone shot at a fiber optic line. This is definitely one for the records, filed under most bizarre, and weird.

Tags: education, technology //