14 DAY TRIAL // Tens of thousands of AT&T, Sprint, Verizon and Comcast customers located in the southern San Francisco Bay Area lost Internet access and phone service yesterday for a significant period of time. The outage was the result of vandals cutting fiber-optic cables at four different underground access points.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the sabotage took place under the cover of night and started at 1:30 a.m. on Thursday, when someone severed four cables belonging to AT&T in an underground vault in south San Jose. Two other lines were similarly severed in a different vault a bit later.
Four more cables belonging to AT&T and Sprint were cut at two locations in San Carlos. The underground access points were protected by heavy metal covers and the cables were very thick and well shielded. The work to splice the total 500 compromised fiber-optic strands back together took hours.
The effects of this significant outage are still being assessed, but losses are expected to be significant, not to mention that people's lives were put at risk. Police officers started heavily patrolling the streets during the incident, trying to act as a link between citizens and the emergency services, which they were no longer able to contact.
Businesses could not perform transactions, send e-mails, or access other services either. Many ATMs were out of order and hospitals could not depend on electronic medical records, causing some operations to be postponed. In all, residents, institutions and companies in three counties, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz and San Benito, were affected.
The San Jose and San Carlos Police Depatments are collaborating in the investigation and the FBI is also assisting. "I pity the individuals who have done this," San Jose Police Chief Rob Davis commented for the San Francisco Chronicle. "They didn't have concern for anyone. We will find who did it," FBI spokesman Chris Carroll stressed.
Meanwhile, AT&T is offering a $100,000 reward for information that leads to the arrest of the vandals. "Following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, AT&T's networks were declared National Critical Infrastructures in recognition of their importance to the nation's security. Anyone who tampers with, destroys or disrupts the company's network or its components is in violation of federal and state laws and AT&T will assist with any prosecution to the fullest extent of the law," a statement from the company reads.