Centurylink Internet Outage 10/1/21

[rondog]

Well, I work for CenturyLink/Lumen, in the Network Operations Center (NOC), and we deal with fiber cuts daily, worldwide. Yes, squirrels love to chew up aerial cables. Rednecks like to shoot them, and the splice cans, too. Drunks also seem to have an affinity for crashing into poles. Then there's storms......Just some of the aerial cable woes.

The biggest underground cable enemy is the underground horizontal boring machines installing new ducts & cables. Then there's highway and RR construction - digging holes, boring holes for light pole footings, driving steel pilings, bridge repairs/rebuilds, flooding, landslides, wildfires, it goes on and on. Oh, farmers and their backhoes too.

What most people don't know is that there's MANY companies that have fiber in the ground and in the air, and there's a huge amount of fiber leasing amongst the various carriers. We have cable between A and Z, and you don't? Lease fibers from us, and run your traffic over them as you wish. It's VERY common.

So, your woes with Lumen, or any other carrier, might be on their cable, with their responsibility to fix it - or it might not. The telecom world is very complex. I can't WAIT to retire.....