Copper cable thief accidentally cuts optical cables, causing a large-scale network outage in Los Angeles – Passionategeekz

Passionategeekz According to the Los Angeles Times, a large-scale outage occurred during Father’s Day in Los Angeles. For example, users in northwest Burbank continued to be disconnected from the early hours of Sunday and did not complete the repair until Monday morning.

Internet service provider Spectrum confirmed that a section of the Van Nuys area was damaged, and the impact range covered some areas of Los Angeles and Ventura. The specific number of affected users has not been counted yet.

Spectrum said the cause of the incident was that a thief mistakenly regarded the optical cable as copper cable, and only after cutting it out, he found that it did not contain any copper material, so he fled. The perpetrators allegedly climbed trees and cut off multiple lines, which caused considerable obstacles to the restoration work.

Spectrum said the maintenance team needed to perform thousands of fiber splicing to restore services—a process that required the whole beam of optical cables to be fused one by one, and an additional maintenance team was sent.

The incident was characterized as a “criminal act of vandalism”, but as of press time, Los Angeles police have not identified the perpetrator. Spectrum offers a reward of up to US$25,000 (Passionategeekz Note: the current exchange rate is approximately RMB 180,000) to collect clues to solve the case.

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