A massive Internet outage, loss of telephone service, and even 911 emergency service communications were the result of an intentional act of sabotage against five different fiber optic cables in the Silicon Valley Bay area of California today, according to authorities.
The impacted Internet and telecommunications providers, including AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon Wireless, scrambled to determine the cause of the outages, which were first reported in the wee hours of the morning on Thursday.
The first four cuts happened just before 1:30 a.m. local time, severing four AT&T cables; the fifth occurred a couple of hours later and took out a Sprint cable.
As the extent of the outage became apparent, the county of Santa Clara called a local state of emergency.
More than 52,000 land lines were out, along with the cellular service for countless wireless customers of Verizon, AT&T, Nextel and Sprint.
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Said Police Sgt. Jim Gillio of the town of Gilroy, “We’ve never to this extent in recent history had this kind of phone outage.”
Police currently have no leads on the perpetrators, who had to open a heavy manhole cover and climb down approximately 8 to 10 feet into the manhole to cut the fiber.
Some have suggested that the Communications Workers of America union, whose contract with AT&T expired last week, may be behind the outage, a charge which was vehemently denied by a CWA spokesperson.
“Absolutely not. Our members are not involved in this,” said CWA spokeswoman Candice Johnson. “That would be counterproductive. We are on the job. So it doesn’t make any sense. Our goal is to get a quality, fair contract and that is our focus right now,” she added.
Service is slowly being restored as crews worked throughout the day and into the night to remedy the situation. Full service is not expected to be restored until around midnight local time or a later, meaning that the immediate impact of the act was to effectively knock out communications to a substantial sector of Silicon Valley and surrounds for a full 24 hours.
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Dallas, Boston, and the Los Angeles AT&T internet hubs went down 2 days ago on August 18,2015. The failure/collapse hit here in Dallas around 1900 Tuesday and internet access was absolutely inoperable for close to 34 hours. Getting me back online Thursday morning required AT&T tech support to interactively re-establish new connections, open ports, and generate new passwords to re-open/re-start my high speed internet.Apparently none of my previously saved access data was functional. My Vipre AV has no indication of invasion and all my OS and data file checks are clean and clear. There seems to be a wall of silence surrounding the circumstances and what happened to cause this. Incredible.
ok what is going on in the Inland Empire this article is about something a week ago. we are hving challenges now here. why is it always so difficult to get a real time analysis of what we are going thru ???