WTF?! Losing your internet connection is especially annoying in today's connected world. What's even more irritating is when an outage is the result of someone accidentally shooting a cable. This was the situation that around 25,000 Spectrum customers in Texas had to deal with last week, marking the third Spectrum outage caused by weapons fire in the last 12 months.
The interruption to ISP Spectrum's service affected around 25,000 people in cities across Texas, including Dallas, Irving, Plano, Arlington, Austin, and San Antonio, according to the Dallas Morning News.
Spectrum owner Charter later confirmed that the outage was the result of a stray bullet that hit a fiber optic data cable that serviced the area.
While fiber optic cables tend to be buried underground, this one was presumably attached to a utility pole. Aerial fiber deployment is common in suburban and rural areas due to cost efficiency and faster deployment, but it does leave the cables exposed to potential damage from external elements.
No other details about the incident were given. Charter did say it was a "stray" bullet rather than an intentional act of vandalism, but there's no information on whether the person who did it came forward or was found, how the ISP knew about it, and if the police were involved. Estimates say there are between 5 million and 25 million firearms in Texas, which is a lot of potential stray bullets.
As noted by The Reg, this is the third time in 12 months that Spectrum's service has been affected by a firearm-related incident. In June, a customer in Ohio was left without service after a shotgun blast damaged a line – no police were involved – and Columbus revellers firing into the air to celebrate the arrival of the 2025 New Year hit Spectrum fiber, leaving customers in one of the capital city's largest neighbourhoods without internet for 43 hours. The gunfire also affected a circuit feeding traffic cameras, disconnecting them for over a day.
It's not a problem limited to Spectrum, either. In 2022, Comcast Xfinity fiber lines in Oakland, California, were peppered with 17 rounds. The resulting outage left 30,000 people offline just before the start of an NFL game between the Los Angeles Rams and the San Francisco 49ers.