Early Thursday morning, vandals (or saboteurs, depending on which news source you read) managed to slip down four manholes (two in San Jose and two in San Carlos) and clip critical fiber optic cables belonging to AT&T, disrupting phone, internet, and cell service to Morgan Hill, San Martin, Gilroy, parts of south San Jose, and areas of Monterey and San Benito counties. We were one of the lucky thousands affected by the outage.

I noticed something was wrong shortly after I woke up, a few minutes before six. As part of my morning routine, I check email while brewing coffee. On Thursday, instead of checking email, I was checking our internet connection and the phone line. By the time the coffeemaker had finished, I had learned both were out of commission. Luckily, my iPhone had reception (two bars). It just couldn't connect to the web.

For fun, I flipped on the television to see if any of the morning news programs could give me any clues as to what was going on, but as I suspected, they were clueless.

On the drive in, I did a quick scan of the radio news stations, but caught all of them running commercials or updating the traffic and weather. After a few minutes, I gave up and switched back to the classical music station, figuring I'd get the scoop when I got to work.

It didn't even occur to me, until I got to the office, that things might be offline there, too. Fortunately, everything was up and running.

Before burying myself in work, I did a quick web search to see if any of the media sites had picked up on the story. The first ones I found were CBS 5 and the Mercury News, so I kept tabs on them throughout the day, supplementing their coverage by keeping an eye on the AT&T's Twitter feed¹ (@attnews).

On my way home, I actually passed one of the locations the vandals/saboteurs struck. Monterey Highway is one of my favorite routes to and from work (when I have to drive). Just as I reached the on-ramp to Blossom Hill Road, the southbound traffic on Monterey slowed. Everyone was gawking at the dozens of news vans and AT&T trucks parked between the road and the railroad tracks. It was quite a sight.

When I got home, I checked the phone line and internet connection just to see if they were back online. They weren't. I flipped on the television and the evening news was finally buzzing about the outage. Most channels estimated service would be restored between 6 and 9 PM. Ours came back around seven o'clock.

Yesterday morning, when I awoke, the first thing I did was check the landline. As soon as I heard the dial tone, I let out a sigh of relief.

What took a few people only a few minutes to break took several crews several hours to repair. That's pretty amazing and incredibly scary. Before Thursday, I had the silly notion our communication system was robust, like rope, but now, I have the paranoid notion it's weak, like string.

It was extremely fortunate that nothing disastrous happened during the outage. If there had been an emergency, inconvenience could have escalated to tragedy. I truly hope the incident will prompt The Powers That Be to make this part of our infrastructure secure.

¹ Which, by the way, was a nifty way of staying updated until I actually returned to the affected area, at which point, I had to rely on traditional media again for the news.