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Comment by gleenn | Hacker News Reader

That's assuming independence. I'm not ruling out sabotage but the world is often not fully independent. A storm or an anchor both may affect multiple cables if they're in generally the same area which would definitely make the probability far more likely than those stated. (edit typo)

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Indeed !

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/lithuania-sweden-...

>Lithuania-Sweden subsea cable cut, was 10m from severed Finnish-German cable

I don't buy that number (no source is attributed to it), or rather, I don't believe there's a single incident causing this.

The C-Lion1 cable is predominantly North-East - South-West whereas the BCS cable is NW-SE. They do meet, but the C-Lion1 operator Cinia says their cable broke about 700 km from Helsinki, east of the southern tip of the Öland island. That's easily over 150 km south from where the cables meet.

Also, C-Lion1 was reported broken at 4m, and the BCS cable at 10am the previous day.

the contrast with independent random events is exactly the point of the comment you've replied to, isn't it?

The point is that even without a malicious actor the odds are way lower than you'd think.

The grandparent comment is total nonsense which sounds smart but is not. Damages from accidents are not independently random either. Or do you think it is virtually impossible that 140 people die on the same airliner? It is likely the same ship cut both either by accident or intentionally.

I am leaning towards sabotage but that two cables were cut means very little.

What are the odds 140 people would all die from an airplane crash on the same day? Wild

I was told in my stats class that events in the real world are almost never truly independent.

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