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Zimbabwe's Internet Went Down for About Five Hours. The Culprit Was Reportedly a Tractor. (slate.com)
Zimbabweans lost internet access en masse on Tuesday when a tractor reportedly cut through key fiber-optic cables in South Africa and another internet provider experienced simultaneous issues with its primary internet conduits. From a report: The outage began shortly before noon local time and persisted for more than five hours, affecting not only citizens' day-to-day internet usage but businesses that rely upon web access. And while five internet-free hours might sound unfathomable to those of us accustomed to having the web constantly at our fingertips, large-scale internet outages -- from inadvertent lapses caused by ship anchors to government-calculated blackouts designed to showcase political power -- do happen, and maybe more frequently than you'd thought. According to local news sources, a tractor in South Africa damaged cables belonging to Liquid Telecom, which has an 81.5 percent market share of Zimbabwe's international-equipped internet bandwidth as of the second quarter of 2017 and leases capacity to other internet providers. In a bad coincidence, city council employees in Kuwadzana, a suburb of Zimbabwe's capitol city of Harare, cut an additional TelOne cable around the same time. (According to NewsDay Zimbabwe, it was an accident. The company blamed "faults that occurred on our main links through South Africa and Botswana" in a statement.)
>> five internet-free hours might sound unfathomable to those of us accustomed to having the web constantly at our fingertips
I've been working with large datacenters for about twenty years now. One of the most terrifying things we can hear is that a truck with a backhoe has just pulled up down the street. And I've seen more "oops, they accidentally dug up all our redundant links" (because they were concentrated at point X) more times than I can count. So yes, it happens, and that large cable that you may see from time to time lying right on the ground (near a hole) is really some poor business's lifeline to the Internet.
This stuff happens even here in the USA.... Not even a stretch... I've had tickets I've closed out for ISPs due to "fiber seeking backhoe"