> The answer was usually "illegal fishing", or "sharks".
You make it sound like every other day some UNDERSEA CABLE gets cut - that's not a once-in-a-blue-moon thing?
You make it sound like every other day some UNDERSEA CABLE gets cut - that's not a once-in-a-blue-moon thing?
I'd expect cables through the Atlantic or Pacific ocean to get damaged much more rarely than cables through your local lake. Shallow waters and sports/amateur boating can damage the cables in shallower waters more easily than in the humongous depths of the greater oceans in the world.
Even rarer is something like the recent Shetland outage where virg cables were lost.
Most of the time I'd find out officially via network operators bulletin boards (i.e. those looking after AS and IXs) there wouldn't be anything reported in the local news because, for most people, as this article alludes to, the content edge servers they actually connect to are pretty close, both physically (distance) and virtually (hops).
"Don't these cables ever break? Yes! Cable faults are common. On average, there are over 100 each year.
You rarely hear about these cable faults because most companies that use cables follow a “safety in numbers” approach to usage, spreading their networks' capacity over multiple cables so that if one breaks, their network will run smoothly over other cables while service is restored on the damaged one.
Accidents like fishing vessels and ships dragging anchors account for two-thirds of all cable faults. Environmental factors like earthquakes also contribute to damage. Less commonly, underwater components can fail. Deliberate sabotage and shark bites are exceedingly rare. "