It had been a crazy week at work, one where I couldn’t keep up with my Google Reader as often as I normally like. While I had heard about the communications disruptions that had happened in the San Francisco area, I really didn’t have the time to dig into the story until I received an email from one of our vendors that we use for emarketing campaigns from time to time, Vertical Response. Here’s an excerpt…

Throughout the day we were in continuous contact with our ISP’s CEO and support teams and learned that the outage was not a normal outage but a carefully coordinated and malicious act of sabotage conducted in four different locations affecting AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, T-Mobile and several internet traffic carriers. We’ve since learned that the person(s) responsible for this act crawled down manholes (8-10 ft deep) that can only be accessed with special tools and used a hacksaw to cut through approximately 500 strands of protected fiber cables.

Our ISP provides two sets of redundant backup circuits in addition to their primary connectivity but all three circuits were taken out by this act of sabotage which affected services all over the San Jose and San Francisco bay area including 911 service, landline phone service, cell service, ATMs and other communications channels. Currently local law enforcement and FBI teams are investigating this case and AT&T is offering a $250,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and prosecution of the perpetrators.

Here are a few links that provide additional details: SFGate, CNET & CBS.

Crazy stuff. Like one of my co-workers said, turns out the internet is a series of tubes after all.