Sabotaging Fiber
Yesterday, vandals in California chopped fiber-optic cables, essentially cutting off thousands of AT&T customers from not just their Internet service, but landline and cell phone services as well. The San Francisco Chronicle reports:
The sabotage essentially froze operations in parts of the three counties at hospitals, stores, banks and police and fire departments that rely on 911 calls, computerized medical records, ATMs and credit and debit cards.
The full extent of the havoc might not be known for days, emergency officials said as they finished repairing the damage late Thursday.
Whatever the final toll, one thing is certain: Whoever did this is in a world of trouble if he, she or they get caught.
To help initiate that “world of trouble,” AT&T is offering a $100,000 reward for information on the vandals. As for communicating with customers during the outage, the company embraced the latest rage in social networking. From CNet:
It seems that Twitter was one of the main ways that phone company AT&T has been communicating with customers and updating the public about the fiber cut that caused thousands of people in Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area to go without broadband, phone, and wireless service for most of Thursday.
Janine Popick, CEO of VerticalResponse, whose company has been affected by the outage, said the only way she has stayed on top of the situation has been through Twitter.
“All of my real time updates have been coming from the AT&T Twitter feed,” she said.
Indeed, she isn’t alone. Nearly 2,400 people have been keeping tabs on the situation via AT&T’s Twitter feed.


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