Slashdot Mirror
Elderly Georgian Woman Cuts Armenian Internet
welcher writes "An elderly Georgian woman was scavenging for copper with a spade when she accidentally sliced through an underground cable and cut off internet services to nearly all of neighboring Armenia. The fibre-optic cable near Tiblisi, Georgia, supplies about 90% of Armenia's internet so the woman's unwitting sabotage had catastrophic consequences. Web users in the nation of 3.2 million people were left twiddling their thumbs for up to five hours. Large parts of Georgia and some areas of Azerbaijan were also affected. Dubbed 'the spade-hacker' by local media, the woman is being investigated on suspicion of damaging property. She faces up to three years in prison if charged and convicted."
If one shallow cable knocks a country out, someone failed pretty hard in the first place.
I don't know an awful lot about backbone type setups, not being in the industry, but I was under the impression that a self healing ring was a fairly common way of dealing with important fiber. That way as long as you don't cut two cables at once, you're golden, and can take your sweet ass time fixing a broken link without a whole bloody country losing internet access.
But of course, redundancy costs money. Hopefully not as much as downtime...
Sent from my PDP-11
Wow, that's messed up. Cable is treated the same as plumbing in Minnesota: A basic part of the infrastructure of a building. The company I work for recently moved about 2,000 people into a new building. We chose to re-use the existing cable plant instead of wiring all new.
That's not normally our practice because we have frequently found that the old cable didn't meet our needs, but still. We've always had the option here and in most other states where we've moved people into an existing building.
Sounds to me like the cable pullers must have quietly greased a few palms in California a while back. :-)