I know that this is not funny, but, well, it kinda is! 🙂 The island nation of Sri Lanka lost data connections on Sunday leaving 800,000 subscribers without Internet access. The problem? Indian ship “State of Nagaland” dropped anchor in the Sri Lankan port of Colombo, and the anchor severed an underwater cable. Story (and links) at http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2004/08/24/errant_anchor_blamed_for_knocking_island_nation_offline.html.
Would This Qualify As A Hardware Problem?
3 responses to “Would This Qualify As A Hardware Problem?”
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Hrmm….wonder if anything turns up on Monster.com for "Commerical deep sea diver + CCNE"
This must’ve been fun for whoever diagnosed the problem. There must be an indicator for physical connection…but at some point, a little green lite stopped blinking, and I doubt the first thing going through the admin’s mind was "I wonder if a ship dropped it’s anchor on the cable…" -
The cable was fully restored a couple of days later. The ship should certainly be held liable. Submarine cables are marked on charts and with buoys, so ships won’t anchor on them. (Such buoys are how US subs managed to locate and tap into Soviet communication lines during the Cold War)
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Thanks for the word on today’s fix, Bob… Sri Lanka currently has a very tense internal situation, so suddenly going dark like that worried me.
For what it’s worth, the Indian ship was determined to not be near the cable at the time, so I guess the cause is still under investigation:
http://www.tamilnet.com/art.html?catid=13&artid=12742 etc
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