Incredible, but true: the most curious accident in the lives of operators
Hurricanes breaking wires, cable theft, vandalism, unfair competition, slow road workers and intrigues of city services - all these are ordinary everyday life of telecom operators. And so that it would not be so sad from all this, we decided to share a selection of the most amazing accidents on the lines and the most unpredictable problems of data centers.
Judging by the comments on the Level 3 blog, our smaller brothers pose a significant danger to wires: squirrels were found to be responsible for 17% of all the company's accidents , other panelists blamed rabbits, and Australian colleagues wombats. Someone complained of woodpeckers, someone shared links to wires with insulation not involving rodents.
Here is a curious story about US-Russian relations: “Once we had a failure on the line in the north of Russia. When we asked our provider why they were repairing the cable for so long, it turned out that it was so cold there in winter that cars weren’t reliable transport and the installers were driving to the scene of the accident with dog teams . ” What is missing here is a comment about the bears gnawing on the cable.
In 2008, Cable & Wireless was robbed. However, there was a hunt not for information, but only for scrap . As a result of the theft of equipment - switches and routers - the Watford site of the company fell, dragging along the websites of some of the company's customers, in particular, the site of the newspaper Financial Times.
Earlier Verizon faced theft of property - unknown persons stole 150 m of the copper cable of the company, disconnecting telecommunications to 400 subscribers. Some corporate clients even had to close their offices because of the impossibility of making payments.
It is interesting that when British telecoms began to switch from copper cables to fiber optic, thieves did not soon understand the difference, and there were cases of digging wires for a long time.
In addition to rodents, the communication lines of our foreign colleagues are disabled by amateurs to practice firing on wires (Level3 says about 7% of accidents for this reason). On January 1, 2008, 20,000 Comcast subscribers remained unconnected, whose air was interrupted by a random firing. The company's management suggested that a certain New Year's cutler thus decided to continue the celebration of the holiday.
Data centers are also not insured "from the fool." A year ago, a car crashed into a power transmission towernear one of the Amazon data centers, and due to a short circuit, the data center was de-energized. When switching to backup power, something did not work, and as a result, the company's customers lost the service for about an hour. The ill-fated data center suffered a power outage for the fourth time in a week.
This threatens not only Amazon - in 2007 a truck crashed into a transformer near the Rackspace Managed Hosting data center - the generator managed to start the power again, but for some reason the cooling systems did not work.
I'd like to mention another curious case in Florida, when a power outage occurred due to the ignition of a transformer. During the investigation, the reason was revealed - overheating from excessive load.Electricity was stolen by a nearby marijuana plantation .
And here is a story from our area: last November, an unbalanced resident went out to fight the cables on the roof of her house - there was nothing left for the arrived installation team, how to record the strange behavior of a citizen on video and call for help. It is a great success that this meeting did not end in an accident.
The topic of accidents on communication lines became the topic of an April Fool’s joke - the editors of the NAG.ru portal issued an emergency message about the theft of 130 km of cable connecting the British Isles with continental Europe.
In our practice, too - which just did not happen - and the workers dug up optics with an excavator, and stole radio antennas, there was even a seizure of our server room in one of the office centers (they did not let us in, but we adjusted the equipment for ourselves). There were also separate client stories - once instead of a router, charging for a mobile was plugged into the socket - the client’s system administrator “got into trouble” with his colleagues along with our support engineers))
But, it seems, we are not original? Colleagues, do you have your own stories?
Judging by the comments on the Level 3 blog, our smaller brothers pose a significant danger to wires: squirrels were found to be responsible for 17% of all the company's accidents , other panelists blamed rabbits, and Australian colleagues wombats. Someone complained of woodpeckers, someone shared links to wires with insulation not involving rodents.
Here is a curious story about US-Russian relations: “Once we had a failure on the line in the north of Russia. When we asked our provider why they were repairing the cable for so long, it turned out that it was so cold there in winter that cars weren’t reliable transport and the installers were driving to the scene of the accident with dog teams . ” What is missing here is a comment about the bears gnawing on the cable.
In 2008, Cable & Wireless was robbed. However, there was a hunt not for information, but only for scrap . As a result of the theft of equipment - switches and routers - the Watford site of the company fell, dragging along the websites of some of the company's customers, in particular, the site of the newspaper Financial Times.
Earlier Verizon faced theft of property - unknown persons stole 150 m of the copper cable of the company, disconnecting telecommunications to 400 subscribers. Some corporate clients even had to close their offices because of the impossibility of making payments.
It is interesting that when British telecoms began to switch from copper cables to fiber optic, thieves did not soon understand the difference, and there were cases of digging wires for a long time.
In addition to rodents, the communication lines of our foreign colleagues are disabled by amateurs to practice firing on wires (Level3 says about 7% of accidents for this reason). On January 1, 2008, 20,000 Comcast subscribers remained unconnected, whose air was interrupted by a random firing. The company's management suggested that a certain New Year's cutler thus decided to continue the celebration of the holiday.
Data centers are also not insured "from the fool." A year ago, a car crashed into a power transmission towernear one of the Amazon data centers, and due to a short circuit, the data center was de-energized. When switching to backup power, something did not work, and as a result, the company's customers lost the service for about an hour. The ill-fated data center suffered a power outage for the fourth time in a week.
This threatens not only Amazon - in 2007 a truck crashed into a transformer near the Rackspace Managed Hosting data center - the generator managed to start the power again, but for some reason the cooling systems did not work.
I'd like to mention another curious case in Florida, when a power outage occurred due to the ignition of a transformer. During the investigation, the reason was revealed - overheating from excessive load.Electricity was stolen by a nearby marijuana plantation .
And here is a story from our area: last November, an unbalanced resident went out to fight the cables on the roof of her house - there was nothing left for the arrived installation team, how to record the strange behavior of a citizen on video and call for help. It is a great success that this meeting did not end in an accident.
The topic of accidents on communication lines became the topic of an April Fool’s joke - the editors of the NAG.ru portal issued an emergency message about the theft of 130 km of cable connecting the British Isles with continental Europe.
In our practice, too - which just did not happen - and the workers dug up optics with an excavator, and stole radio antennas, there was even a seizure of our server room in one of the office centers (they did not let us in, but we adjusted the equipment for ourselves). There were also separate client stories - once instead of a router, charging for a mobile was plugged into the socket - the client’s system administrator “got into trouble” with his colleagues along with our support engineers))
But, it seems, we are not original? Colleagues, do you have your own stories?