Attack on the grid

Tens of thousands of Northern Californians were without Internet access, landline or wireless phone services after sabotage apparently severed fiber optic cables. Word is someone(s) opened manhole covers in San Jose and San Carlos, south of San Francisco, in the pre-dawn hours Friday morning and cut several fiber optic cables belonging to AT&T and Sprint. The New York Times reports approximately 52,000 Verizon landline and wireless customers were also affected. Because AT&T provides the fiber connections that link cell phone towers to their respective networks, wireless subscribers from almost every carrier were also affected by the attack. Some Verizon Communications DSL customers also lost service, because their system uses AT&T fiber-optic cables to send its data traffic to its own nationwide network.