Service Severed, Californians Return to Stone Age

Full telecommunications service was restored overnight to several coastal California counties that were totally cut off from modern technological civilization for more than 17 hours yesterday after a saboteur cut several underground fiber-optic cables.

"Cut here."

Verizon Communications (VZ), which leases the lines from AT&T (T), said that more than 52,000 households in the towns of Morgan Hill and Gilroy, along with parts of Santa Cruz and San Benito counties, were without service for most of Thursday.

Three factors make this a big story: No. 1, the outage occurred on the edge of Silicon Valley, where many tech industry nabobs have their estates.

Second, the sabotage happened just as the strike against AT&T by the Communications Workers of America, whose members repair the lines that were cut, has swung into a critical and contentious phase. The CWA immediately released a statement disavowing any involvement with the monkey-wrenching, but several outlets speculated that a rogue striker may have taken matters into his/her own pair of wire-cutters. It was clear from the nature of the act that a technician must have committed it.

Security expert Richard Stiennon, on his ThreatChaos blog, posted a letter from Puget Sound-area ISP Telekenex, whose service has links through the Bay Area and whose customers were affected, saying that “an AT&T employee accessed a manhole between Redwood City and San Carlos CA. and cut all fiber links.”

Finally, the day-long outage makes clear the more general vulnerability of our essential telecom networks – particularly so-called “wireless” cellular systems, of which something like 80 percent are backhauled on fiber-optic, and even copper, cable. Stores could not accept credit cards, banks could not operate, and cut-off firefighters took to nearby hilltops to scan for smoke.

“The first responder and cellular networks including 911 access, police and fire, are all backhauled over landlines,” Stiennon told VON. “They are just as vulnerable to fiber attacks as any other communication service.”

Underlining the seriousness of the sabotage, AT&T is offering a $100,000 reward for information on the perpetrators. Some commentators outlined the doomsday scenario: “What would happen if someone were to coordinate with a group of people and demolish key areas where fiber concentrations are very thick in major cities around the world?” asked Barrett Lyon in a post on the BitGravity blog entitled 'Destroy the Internet With a Hacksaw.' “What if it were done all at the same time?”

Considering that it would cost many billions of dollars to lay redundant backhaul networks, that’s not a question any of the major carriers are eager to answer today.