Apparently A Single Bullet Can Wipe Out Internet Access For An Entire City

The Register – Although Charter didn't specify how many customers were impacted, Downdetector data suggests more than 25,000 customers were affected last Friday (September 26).

The bullet damaged a fiber optic cable in the Dallas area, according to Spectrum.

“Our teams worked quickly to make the necessary repairs and get customers back online,” Spectrum said in a statement. “We apologize for the inconvenience.”

The outage also reportedly impacted a number of cities beyond Dallas, including Irving, Plano, Arlington, Austin, and San Antonio.

It's a little crazy to me how easily accessible these cables capable of shutting down the internet for 25,000 homes across a city are. Especially considering how incredibly reliant society has become on the internet. Not having internet for a day renders so many people completely unable to do their jobs. An entire small city's worth of people losing their internet for a workday can cause some real problems. I'd have thought by now they'd have those wires buried deep in the ground to avoid things like this. But I suppose that's either too expensive, or simply unavoidable in certain areas. So the cables are just right above our heads. Easily reachable with a bullet for anybody in the mood to cause a bit of chaos. 

But I can't possibly read this story and not have my mind immediately go to, "How could we use this to our advantage?"

If only I were armed with information (and a gun) back during covid. There were days I was so desperate not to work, that had I known where the magic wire in the sky was that killed the internet for my particular area of Columbus, I might have risked it all just to catch a quick afternoon nap. Or if I was lucky, a couple day long vacation. Apparently that actually did happen right in Columbus, Ohio at the start of this year. 

The ISP suffered another gunfire-related outage in Ohio last New Year's Eve. Residents in Columbus rang in 2025 with stray rounds that struck Spectrum's fiber, leaving customers in Hilltop offline for 43 hours and cutting a circuit that knocked local traffic cameras offline for over a day.

You could always just lie to your boss about your personal internet being out, but then you have to be worried that he knows you're lying. Even if your internet truly does go out, he's probably going to think you're lying. But if enough people lose internet that it makes the local news... now you've got a certified reason to not be working.  

Except it would be way too risky to try something like that just to get yourself a day off of work. More likely than not, your boss would give you some bullshit non-internet required task to do anyways. But imagine you were back in college... and you knew where the magic wire was that shut off internet for the entire campus... Now that could be a lucrative endeavor. I know there are plenty of dumbass rich kids at campuses across America who would pay good money to shut off the internet on the day of an exam. Or the day before a big paper is due to buy them some more time. Or just because they want to go out drinking extra hard on a Tuesday night. Colleges (especially since covid when they all mastered the whole online schooling thing) are more reliant on the internet than anyone. To this day, professors are teaching classes online, and giving exams online just because they can. They don't want to drive into work as much as students don't want to walk to class. A couple days of no internet would bring a sizable university to a screeching halt. 

Just something to think about kids. Maybe a good reason to get yourself a gun.