The report states the outage was caused by workmen folks but who knows in this climate of government snooping
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/23/global_crossing_docklands_break/Workmen in London's Docklands sliced through a major fibre optic trunk yesterday, forcing businesses and ISPs nationwide to reroute internet traffic.
Contractors in Yeo Street broke the link, owned by tier one provider Global Crossing, early on Wednesday afternoon.
The O2 and Be Broadband network was the highest profile casualty. Customers noticed slower speeds as the the remaining backup connections struggled to carry all the traffic.
A Be Broadband spokesman said at 1pm today that its services were almost back to normal. The firm expects repair work to be completed in time for this evening's peak network load. Connexions4London also reported major problems.
Its often the case that to splice into a bundle of optical cable and insert some "government snooping devices" a propagation properties change will be noticed and often this kind of "accident" pretext is used to cover the fact that tampering has occured, maybe I,m just getting too suspicious but we all know AT&T did the same thing when they allowed the NSA into their internet backbone fibre.
I,m sure anyone who knows their onions in the optical fibre network deployments arena of the sort we are talking here will confirm these peering fibres are not so shallowly buried as is being made out they are buried rather deeply so this alone has me very suspicious.
