75-year-old woman causes Internet outage in Georgia and Armenia
The cause: A 75-year-old Georgian woman who was in search of some scrap metal.
The retired woman was reportedly going to steal a segment of the fibre-optic cabling; possibly assuming it was a traditional copper cable that could fetch a tidy sum on the scrap-metal market. The septuagenarian was arrested by authorities in a village nearby Georgia's capital city of Tbilisi and could be charged with damaging public property.
The Georgian Railway Telecom company, that owns the fibre-optic line, was obviously surprised at the amount of damage their cables incurred. "I cannot understand how this lady managed to find and damage the cable," said Giorgi Ionatamishvili, head of the company's marketing department. "It has robust protection and such incidents are extremely rare."
Although some may wonder why an elderly woman would go so far as to sever an underground cable, it's worth noting that scrap-metal is a major export of Georgia, a country that sits on the border between Eastern Europe and Asia.
A check of the telecom company's Web site earlier today also showed that repair works to the underground cables were complete, about nine hours after the accident occurred. We assume that Internet users in Georgia and Armenia would have their connections restored as well.
Hopefully the incident would encourage telecommunications and energy companies to lay underground cables more efficiently. Imagine what could have happened if a high-voltage power cable was involved.
Via Yahoo News
About the author
Timothy Fernandez is the subeditor at CNET Asia, as well as resident movie and music buff. With a background in mass communication and photography, he decided on a career in tech writing. He's also--secretly--an aspiring pop vocalist.
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