Internet vandalism. Sounds ridiculous, right? It is—ridiculously expensive today for organizations that are Wave Broadband customers in Northern California. Employees, including those at city hall, went into work on Tuesday only to discover a widespread Internet outage.
But there are even more layers of absurdity here.
One software company’s employees, made up mostly of computer engineers, had to do work offline or tether their own cell phones for a connection. How’s that for BYOD? Needless to say, that doesn’t make for a productive day.
While we’ve seen many stories about accidentally cut lines due to construction and other outage culprits, this outage has been identified as a deliberate act by someone who intentionally severed three major fiber optics cables in the Bay area. The broadband internet cables, which Wave uses, belong to Zayo Group Holdings Inc. and Level 3 Communications.
“A mysterious string of attacks on fiber optic cables in the San Francisco Bay area, including one that severely disrupted Internet service at numerous businesses and residential buildings Tuesday morning,” MSN reports. In fact, this incident raises the total number of attacks on internet lines in San Francisco area to 11 in just one year. The FBI is investigating all of these “ruthless acts of vandalism.”
That’s not all.
Wave couldn’t tell customers when they’d be up and running. That leaves organizations wondering if tomorrow will be yet another day that their employees have to code offline, go without email and all of the cloud-based applications—CRM systems, marketing automation and document sharing—we’ve come to utilize so much. At that point, does it even make sense to go to the office?
Out of all of the absurdity? This pain can all easily be avoided. Don’t put yourself at the mercy of one provider, because even the most stable experience the most odd outages. Diversify your services.
Kimpton Hotels and The Second City are two companies that refuse to go down this way. Here’s how they’ve easily foolproofed their networks.
Interested in learning more about how your network is running today? Here’s a free ISP Healthcheck.