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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.)
Any details on why a tractor would have been able to cut through what should have been buried in a concrete trench? I thought the rule was that the more vulnerable and possible to be interfered with by humans, the more armoring and protection a fiber cable would have.
For example, near shore, a cable is deeply buried and clad with multiple layers of steel pipe, then gradually far offshore it becomes a lesser and lesser diameter rubber shielded cable.
That a tractor could cut through accidentally sounds like poor cable protection to begin with.
>> 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.
It took that long for a 419 scammer to complain? Must have been in the early morning hours when the village was asleep!
I believe this is what is known as "Backhoe Fade."
A farmer in Michigan took out the internet with a backhoe for several hours. His farm is on the I-94 corridor and he accidentally cut through Merit's backbone connection. It made being the LMS administrator for a college with 500+ online courses a lot of fun. Phone rings: "Hi, I can't connect to my online classes!"
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Mugabe may be "resigned" but his minions are still about, expect more "tractor incidents" to come.
That places have certain beliefs and because those beliefs (burning books after 2000) contradict that of open and free information they cut the cables.
I guess you'd never prove it, but if you are saying governments do it to show political power then why not call them out so at least those of us living in countries where that isn't a problem know not to start business in those countries.
It seems that would help more than anything.
Also, did they have this problem in Rome when they laid roads? With water and sewage systems in every town in every location on the planet? With gas lines and electricity cables all over the planet.
Someone should make a compendium of what countries had what problems with what infrastructures and how they eventually stopped it as well as how the curve of occurrences of things like this went down throughout history.
It seems a bit absurd at this point, but at least you could rank countries by freedom using that index.
It's strange, in south Texas I have that issue more often with the Internet than I did with Internet and Electricity in Guatemala. I'm pretty sure nobody killed anybody over it either.
Always cause problems, so do road works and even the rats who love to be near cables as they are warm and tasty. Seems like rats want more fibre in their diets.
There are maps and numbers you can clal to check in Australia for instance, but if you do not mark it correctly, provide correct feedback or just damn lazy, it can still cause a fibre break.
Tow it to the shop Mr. Sulu.
You can think Jimmy Carter for giving the world Robert Mugabe.
No, really, you can.
In April of 1979, the first fully democratic election in Zimbabwe history's occurred. Of the eligible black voters, 64% participated, braving the threat of terrorist attacks by Mr. Mugabe's Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front party, which managed to kill 10 people. Prior to the election, Mr. Mugabe had issued a death list with 50 individuals he named as "traitors, fellow-travelers, and puppets of the Ian Smith regime, opportunistic running-dogs and other capitalist vultures." Nevertheless, Bishop Abel Muzorewa of the United Methodist Church emerged victorious and became prime minister of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, as the new country was called.
Yet the Carter administration, led by the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young, would have none of it. Mr. Young referred to Mr. Muzorewa, one of the very few democratically elected leaders on the African continent, as the head of a "neo-fascist" government. Mr. Carter refused to meet Mr. Muzorewa when the newly elected leader visited Washington to seek support from our country, nor did he lift sanctions that America had placed on Rhodesia as punishment for the colony's unilateral declaration of independence from the British Empire in 1965.
It's obvious that a John Deere tractor detected someone trying to load new firmware onto it from an online source and merely acted to protect itself.
When someone says, "Any fool can see
These types of issues are common, especially in the midwest of the US. However, it shouldn't have caused an outage. I see in the article that they're not sure why redundant links didn't work.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
What? Much of this country has Comcast, so more than five total hours of outages happen nearly every week.
For five hours, an entire continent was spared creimer's presence!
Once is an accident. Twice in a short time frame is a coincidence. Twice in a short time frame shortly after a dramatic change in government is a very suspicious coincidence.
It seems like not that long ago when I was in support, call volume spiked, and we found out later that somebody backhoed a huge portion of the US network. MAE East used to go down all the time. This is just normal growing pains in a developing network. It can still happen to "mature" networks.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Fuck off
Clearly net neutrality would have prevented this. And also given everyone a pet unicorn that farts rainbows.
Whenever you go hiking way out in the woods, always be sure to carry a length of fiber along with you, in case you get lost. This way when the backhoe operator arrives to dig it up, you just follow him home.
Just cause.
https://xkcd.com/908/
Backhoe Fade
http://wspa.com/2017/12/05/charter-spectrum-internet-outage-spans-5-states/
Here in the U.S., a few days ago it was reported there were 5 states where customers of Spectrum internet (formally Time Warner Cable) had outages. The cause: a fiber line in South Carolina was cut.
Accessible copper cables don't last long in the UK, let alone in Zimbabwe. The UK ones mostly get stolen by East Europeans who ship it back there and return there themselves when the police get close to them, to be replaced by new guys. It is a big reason for going to fibre. I expect the "tractor" driver was disappointed when he turned up fibre.
Be on the lookout for "coincidences" in Zimbabwe.
Tractors don't cut cables, people do.
"Be vewy vewy quiet, I'ma huntin' fibah!"