Vandals San Francisco USA

Vandals blamed for phone and Internet outage | Wireless - CNET News

Vandals are to blame for the massive phone and Internet outage in Silicon Valley on Thursday, an AT&T representative has confirmed.

A story published by the San Francisco Chronicle and carried on SFGate.com first reported that police confirmed the phone and Internet outage that has left thousands of customers in the San Jose, Calif., area without phone or broadband Internet service was caused by vandals who had cut fiber-optic cables.

Police told the newspaper that four AT&T fiber-optic cables were severed shortly before 1:30 a.m. PDT along Monterey Highway north of Blossom Hill Road in South San Jose. A cable in San Carlos, Calif., owned by Sprint Nextel was also cut about two hours later, Crystal Davis, a Sprint spokeswoman confirmed.

Davis said that a manhole cover had been lifted, and the fiber underground had been cut. She confirmed that the Sprint fiber that was cut also appeared to be the work of vandals. But she explained that fiber cuts happen all the time, typically due to an accident.

"Fiber cuts happen more often than people think," she said. "Usually it happens accidentally when someone is drilling in the ground, landscaping a lawn or repairing some other infrastructure in the ground. We know this happens all the time, so we're ready to reroute traffic whenever we have to."

Earlier AT&T confirmed the incident and said it's working to resolve the problem. . . . "