I was going through old photos, and found this one I took in London back in December 2016, after an urban fox somehow found its way 3 stories below ground at our City of London office... and chewed through our fibre, killing our internet until a contractor could rewire things 4 days later. Banana for scale.
We dubbed the critter FibreFox.
What are the most unique reasons you've had an outage?
Worked on telecoms on the railway,
We had a under rail crossing circuit which we were sure was the issue why we had intermittent Comms down the track.
After arguing with the customer they eventually paid to have this 200m section of cable replaced. We found literally a rat's nest of cables where the local rats had made home! It would have been lovely and warm for them!
Cost us and the customer loads to get sorted!
I was even testing the cables at one point in the snow!
EmployeeMy favorite total data center outage was caused by a random rain drop.
We had just finished a major maintenance of our data center generators for power outages. A couple days later a major rainstorm comes through town and power gets cut off. Generator kicks on as it should and then a raindrop hit just right and ricocheted off the pavement and hit the water sensor on the bottom of the generator making the generator think it was flooding and powered off. Within 30 minutes all batteries are drained in the data center and the whole thing shut down. Took 36 hours straight to bring all the systems back online in a graceful manner and validate everything was working. Longest day ever!!!
