Long ago a customer who had a data center hastily constructed would call me every Monday morning about 4am to find out if his DS3's were up. I'd check and let him know.<p>After one day where all of them were down at the same time he said "Damn homeless people!" He later explained the local telco hastily ran lines under a bridge to get some circuits setup on time. The local homeless folks tended to gather under the bridge and when they started fires to keep warm his circuits running above them would heat up and go down.
About 20 years ago I worked for a CLEC, and the physical plant manager had some stories. Mostly about squirrels, but he had a nice selection of pictures of equipment that had been shot at, as well.<p>The squirrels I can understand. But why allegedly intelligent humans feel the need to shoot holes in things that don't belong to them, especially obvious things like infrastructure, I just don't get. I love to go plinking, but I put in a lot of effort to be responsible about it. I end up picking up a lot of trash and other people's discarded brass, too.
Also mentions the "Shot Spotter" technology, which has some controversy associated with it:<p><a href="https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/four-problems-with-the-shotspotter-gunshot-detection-system/" rel="nofollow">https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/four-problems-w...</a>
Stuff like this has been a problem in the US mountain west so long that all the big substations that are remotely near roads have been getting berms and plating around key equipment because you'll drive down any given road in rural New Mexico or where-ever and every single road sign is pockmarked with bullet impacts and in some cases giant tears from the larger calibers.<p>It's a silent impetus behind so much of the communications out there staying on microwave or powerline carrier despite fiber runs being cheap and easy.
I have experience with this, this happened at our office in Houston. In that area, Comcast hung its fiber on the power poles, and I strongly suspect someone got drunk and decided to pop random hanging cables.
I co-op'd at a major cable ISP. Was told that in certain areas they issued company owned firearms to their field employees due to past incidents. Outages caused by gunshots were actually fairly common in certain parts of America.
I live in Oakland and my XFinity internet was broken by this, and the cable TV service was not affected. I have an alternate connection through AT&T fiber, so on our mobile devices we just switched to the other WiFi and carried on.<p>Unfortunately our TiVo Edge uses an Ethernet connection to the XFinity cable modem, and TiVo's OS responds to an internet outage by deciding your TiVo account is closed and it silently stops recording anything, even after the network comes back. It takes a reboot to fix this.<p>It deliberately skipped recording some things on Sunday night I'd been looking forward to. If I hadn't noticed this morning and forced a reboot it would still be stuck in that state. I am really annoyed that they coded their software like that. It's like withdrawing service the second it can't be verified is TiVo's top priority and they don't even bother trying to restore service afterwards.
So, a shooting was reported and videotaped two hours before the outage?<p>It would seem that either the bullets fired in the air decided to hover for a while before dropped back down, or the first shooting had nothing to do with the outage, or..? Odd writeup.<p>Also,<p>> Along with Internet connectivity, all Comcast Xfinity services, including [...] home security systems went down.<p>I wonder how many consumers realize that their home security system is tied to the "cable"? Or the same with their Comcast "landline"?