yesterday, at about 6:00 am american central daylight time, a tree fell on and damaged a fiberoptic cable that linked our server's datacenter to the internet. the tweets from the datacenter tenant have since been deleted, but the damage was severe. the cable was actually a bundle of over 100 individual cables that had to be repaired one by one. a crew worked through the day yesterday and a second crew worked all night and into this morning to repair the cables. as far as i could tell, this incident was a coincidence - it did not have anything to do with the server migration to the new datacenter. there was also some information early on that the cable was damaged by copper thieves, but this was either false or an even bigger coincidence, and that copper thief damage, if it even existed, was quickly repaired.
living in the same area as the datacenter and damaged cable, i can tell you that there was no severe weather at the time of the damage. i was definitely surprised that this cable was run above ground. it's hard to bury things around here due to the geology (or lack thereof), but it's usually done for critical infrastructure anyway just because we get hurricanes and ... trees falling on things. i'm hopeful that this incident was expensive enough to make some bean counters rethink running fiber above ground, even in houston. otherwise, i can always move the server somewhere else. this was the first major downtime i've had with the current provider since i moved the server there in summer 2017. so i'm willing to give them another chance for now.
living in the same area as the datacenter and damaged cable, i can tell you that there was no severe weather at the time of the damage. i was definitely surprised that this cable was run above ground. it's hard to bury things around here due to the geology (or lack thereof), but it's usually done for critical infrastructure anyway just because we get hurricanes and ... trees falling on things. i'm hopeful that this incident was expensive enough to make some bean counters rethink running fiber above ground, even in houston. otherwise, i can always move the server somewhere else. this was the first major downtime i've had with the current provider since i moved the server there in summer 2017. so i'm willing to give them another chance for now.
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