Woke up this morning to no internet. Turns out someone cut as many as six fiber optic phone lines in a critical area of South San Jose early this morning, which left much of the Silicon Valley, as well as Santa Cruz and San Benito counties, almost completely cut off from the outside world. Here in Santa Cruz, we’ve been able to call locally, but we haven’t been able to call outside the county, to access the internet, or, oddly enough, to access 911. Our cell phones haven’t worked at all. My husband came home from work early, as his job is pretty much entirely dependent on the internet.
Seems trivial, but when the phones don’t work, the ATMs don’t work, the check and bank card verification systems don’t work, which means that, for the most part, if you don’t have cash, you don’t buy. I found myself waiting in a line outside my bank this morning to withdraw a little cash to get through the day. They had security guards all around, and were only letting one person in the bank at a time (and were allowing withdrawals of no more than $100). Rather surreal, altogether!
They are saying that the lines were cut deliberately, and last I heard, the police think it may be connected to the union’s dispute with AT&T.
I’m slightly suspicious of that laying of the blame… depends… if it’s being blamed on the unions… it’s possible, of course, but it’s also possible that just the opposite could be true, and just being used to paint the unions as evil. It would not be a new trick.
No matter who really did it though, if it was purposefully done, serious consequences are warranted.
Scary! I’m glad things are fixed to the point you can get online again.
It’s maddening when the credit card machine is merely slow like it was most of yesterday - NWSP would lose so much money if we couldn’t do credit cards, debit cards, or checks!!!
Some places still can’t take cards this evening. It’s amazing just how dependent we are on technology anymore.
I’ve been kind of suspicious about the union connection, not because I’d put it past them, but because a) they haven’t reached the strike deadline yet and b) AT&T thought that talks were progressing well, and really didn’t think this had much to do with the situation (there’s also the fact that a lot more was affected than just AT&T). It’s possible it’s just a media spin…or perhaps there’s a single employee who has a grudge.
If a mere six optic fibres being severed can cause this much havoc, they’d be a great target for terrorist attacks. I hope NorCal and the world learn from this and provide better backups.
When the crunch started last year, we put a couple of hundred away in notes against the possibility of the card problems when all the banks started tumbling.
Any modern city is wide open to communications interuption. If terrorists wanted to wreak havoc they would go directly at the switching centres, not just a few cables in a field. There is all sorts of alternate routing built into these networks - to a point - but no-one wants to pay beyond that point, so a determined terrorist group can pretty much tie up most communications with 5-10 well chosen targets. Govts have separate networks, of course, but I am talking about the networks that people use, and as Redwolf has noted, those are pretty pervasive in our modern lives.
These were fiber optic cables (each carrying a large number of individual fibers), located in a bunker owned by AT&T (but each in a different location in the bunker). The people who did this knew exactly what they were doing.
fearfaoin…is NC a “right to work” state now? It wasn’t when we lived there.
Locking manholes and pulse-proof automobiles coming soon to a town near you.
Seriously. This was bad, bad @##$ and all the person had to do was crawl down there and start cutting. I always thought our open reservoirs were bad enough, terror-wise.
As for cars, I propose the model car, the “Nuclear Winter” that requires no electronic circuitry that can be damaged by pulse bombs or plasma bursts (don’t know if the latter is possible). Make it 4 wheel drive and make it run on multiple fuels.
Actually, it wasn’t that simple. According to the Mercury News article (which apparently isn’t working at the moment), the manhole covered were designed to require a special tool and technique to open. The average person couldn’t just go down there and start cutting…he’d have to have the right tools and the knowledge of how to use them just to get into the underground bunker. He’d also need the right tools to cut the cables, and he’d have to know which ones to cut.
But yeah…definitely bad @##$. I have to admit that terrorism was my first thought, especially when we got the earliest reports, which suggested that the entire Silicon Valley area was cut off (turns out now it was mostly limited to South San Jose, Morgan Hill, Gilroy and Santa Cruz County). The scariest thing for me, personally, would be the lack of emergency services…can you imagine if a loved one were having a heart attack or stroke, or if someone was in the process of breaking into your home, and you had to drive (or run, or take the bus) to the nearest police station for help? Scary stuff.
