Silicon Valley phone and Internet service down, sabotage suspected
Service to Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint customers in the southern San Francisco Bay area was lost today in an incident being blamed on sabotage. Phone and Internet access went down on Thursday morning when four underground fiberoptic cables in San Jose and two cables in San Carlos, California were cut.
The outage also disrupted 911 emergency services. NETCOM, the dispatch center for local fire and policies agencies, has been able to receive 911 calls placed from landline phones today, but not from cell phones, according to the Mercury News. Police said they are investigating how the cables were cut. Service was expected to be fully restored by this evening. A smaller Comcast outage impacting 4,500 customers in San Jose started at around 1:00 pm PDT today.