One Wednesday afternoon in the summer of 2006, the Pentagon lost most of its telecommunications links to the north and central US. Its analysts were frantically scrambling to find the cause of this outage when, 15 minutes later, they also lost all connection with the southern central US, too.rn"We thought it was a terrorist attack," says Glenn Zimmerman of the Pentagon's cyberspace task force. Thankfully, it proved to be an accidental outage: a construction crew in Kansas City, Missouri, hadrndug up a bundle of fibre-optic cables with an earth mover, tearing apart 150 interstate "fat pipes" - and all the fibre they used for back-ups. By coincidence an unrelated construction crew in Oklahoma City then achieved a similar feat, breaking 400 more fat pipes. "Together, they obliterated communications for 36 hours," says Zimmerman.
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