Early Thursday morning April 9, 2009 four attacks on AT&T fiber facilities in and around San Jose and San Francisco involved early morning manhole cover removals, descending into the dark and then attacking protected fiber cables. The outage affected voice and Internet services for thousands of residences, businesses, E911 services and several wireless operators who had contracted with AT&T to backhaul cell tower traffic to switches for processing. AT&T is the largest local phone company in California and is preparing for a work stoppage by the Communications Workers of America who signaled that they intend to strike. Could the strike and the cut fiber be connected?
Significantly, the company used Twitter to keep customers up-to-date with the repair status. Some 2,400 followers got nine updates on the repairs. This sure beats the old emails announcing that the email server had gone offline…. and then, that it was online again. Good going AT&T.
