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A Bullet Crashed the Internet In Texas (404media.co) 104

Posted by msmash from the stranger-things dept.
alternative_right writes: Last week, thousands of people in North and Central Texas were suddenly knocked offline. The cause? A bullet. The outage hit cities all across the state, including Dallas, Irving, Plano, Arlington, Austin, and San Antonio. The outage affected Spectrum customers and took down their phone lines and TV services as well as the internet.

"The outage stemmed from a fiber optic cable that was damaged by a stray bullet," Spectrum told 404 Media. "Our teams worked quickly to make the necessary repairs and get customers back online. We apologize for the inconvenience."

Spectrum told 404 Media that it didn't have any further details to share about the incident so we have no idea how the company learned a bullet hit its equipment, where the bullet was found, and if the police are involved.
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A Bullet Crashed the Internet In Texas More

A Bullet Crashed the Internet In Texas

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  • think of the children's internet!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Z80a ( 971949 )

      As long people want guns, people will obtain guns.
      You need to make people don't want guns, and in a place like texas, "think of the children" will just not work.
      You probably have to sell it as the "coward's way" or something, which probably will lead to a bunch of machete wielding texans, which is bloody and terrible, but has less collateral damage.

      • Could make it too inconvenient for casual ownership. Add ownership license with mandatory training, per firearm renewal fee, fines for improperly stored firearms, confiscate unlicensed, no exceptions for grandfathered guns, etc.

        On the other hand, I'm not a fan of being in a country where the police are armed like a military and the civilians have nothing. Not that a direct confrontation would be productive. I guess it's more of a feeling/fear than any practical consideration.

  • Last time I was in Alaska... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Wednesday October 01, 2025 @06:45PM (#65696678)

    Some of the road signs were so full of bullet holes as to be unreadable - so I'm kind of surprised this story isn't from that state.

    Although, I suppose, if I were going to pick a likely alternative to Alaska in this regard, the immediately obvious choices would be Texas and Florida.

    • As a child in Texas on backcountry family drives, the main sights to see were roadrunners, tumbleweeds, smashed skunks, possums, and armadillos, road signs perforated to unreadability by bullets, and piles of beer cans and bottles at the side of the road.

      • Speaking as a Brit I find it astounding that there seem to be so few controls on gun use in the USA. Yes: I know what the second amendment is but surely it is time that this was retired. An Internet outage is hardly important but 4.43 deaths per 100k is huge, you are not the worse but up there. [worldpopul...review.com]

        • KMFDM predicted this.
        • Some of those deaths are bad guys though. Pew-pew!

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by quenda ( 644621 )

          Good gun control means restricting handguns and automatic weapons. It means guns being securely locked away when not in use. Registration.
          None of that will stop dickheads vandalising signs.

          Thinking about it, bullet holes in signs are far less common in Australia than decades ago. I doubt that is because semi-autos were banned.
          Maybe it is a case of people taking guns more seriously. A bit like we have far fewer drunk drivers on the road now.

          • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

            by buck-yar ( 164658 )
            So you want to take away the great equalizer for women, the handgun? Registration, how does that help, so they can make process crimes and bully people they don't like? A list of people to harass? What exactly is going to be done with a list of gun owners? Turn them into instant suspects anytime someone's shot? And what's up with people going after guns talking about registration etc just because someone fired off a stray bullet and it broke something? If some murderer can't get a gun, they do it with a kni

            • >"So you want to take away the great equalizer for women, the handgun?"

              It's not just women. Elderly, handicapped, frail, etc. A world without guns is a world in which the physically stronger will still prey on the physically weaker with knives, hammers, fists, tire-irons, whatever. People seem to forget that part. For defensive use, there are estimates that "good" people with guns stop at least a million violent crimes in the USA every year, and 99+% of that is without ever firing a single shot.

              Wishi

              • Re:Last time I was in Alaska... (Score:5, Insightful)

                by quenda ( 644621 ) on Thursday October 02, 2025 @02:56AM (#65697406)

                A world without guns is a world in which the physically stronger will still prey on the physically weaker with knives, hammers, fists, tire-irons, whatever.

                You know, there is a world without gun prevalence. But something tells me you don't even own a passport.

                • You know, there is a world without gun prevalence. But something tells me you don't even own a passport.

                  Then you should know the truth of his words. If you do not see it, then you are either a bully or blind to the world around you.

                • Surely you aren't talking about the 'world' you need a passport to travel to that drug the rest of us into multiple world wars that lead to the worst 'gun violence' to ever occur? Isn't there still a war going on in that part of the 'world'? Hasn't NATO had to step in to stop genocide recently (Kosovo comes to mind) in that 'world'. The one that left behind messes in places like Isreal / Palestine, India / Pakistan, etc that the rest of us are still trying to clean up. Not to mention their mass geonocid
                • What you mean to go to Europe, the home of World War I and World War and the Holocaust? If there's anything that says 'keep your guns,' governments murdering their own citizens is the reason.
                • I have a gun and a passport. What prize do I receive?

                  • Re: (Score:2)

                    by quenda ( 644621 )

                    I have a gun and a passport. What prize do I receive?

                    I think you missed the point. GP said "A world without guns is a world in which the physically stronger will still prey on the physically weaker "
                    The fantasy of guns reducing crime shows he has no clue about the actual world beyond his borders.

                    Is your gun locked in a secure gun safe when not in use?
                    Nothing wrong with responsible gun owners. I don't mind a bit of huntin' and fishin' myself.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by quenda ( 644621 )

              So you want to

              Have you been taking debating lessons from Cathy Newman?

              But apologies, I know this is a sensitive topic in the US, and I should have said "regulating", not restricting.
              I'm not against concealed carry in the US, given your unfortunate circumstances.
              But loaded handguns in handbags, drawers, and glove compartments, very much against.
              In no other country are there statistics for gun homicides by toddlers.

              If some murderer can't get a gun, they do it with a knife, or a truck.

              Of course, its all the same. Think how much money the US Army could save if they got rid of the guns, and fou

            • If some murderer can't get a gun, they do it with a knife, or a truck. The notion someone is going to think "oh crap, I can't get a gun, guess I won't commit that mass murder" doesn't seem plausible.

              Plausible, right...

              If it's so implausible then explain why the USA has a higher intentional homicide rate than (in order from most to least) Estonia, Latvia, Turkiye, Chile, Hungary, Canada, France, Finland, Israel, Sweden, Denmark, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Australia, Portugal, Slovenia, Iceland, Slovak Rep

              • Why is Switzerland on that list? Last I checked their homicide rate was about the same as America's. Gun ownership is pretty close as well.

                • Don't know where you got your figures, the ones I see have Switzerland at about 1/10th the murder rate.

                  • Then what the hell was I thinking of? Was it gun crime? US is #1, Switzerland is #4. No, that doesn't seem right. I just remember being annoyed because I expected it to be less.

            • âoe The notion someone is going to think "oh crap, I can't get a gun, guess I won't commit that mass murder"⦠âoe
              Statistically, yes, if you look at new laws created and enforced in countries like Australia and NZ after such incidents. But, yeah, different culture and such.

        • As a note, gun deaths includes suicides. In the U.S. it is easy/common for people to kill themselves with a gun, elsewhere the suicidal residents need to be more creative - pills, jump off bridge/building, walk into traffic/train, knives, etc.

          If you remove suicide by gun, the U.S. statistics look 'better', a lot better.

          Over 50% of suicides in the U.S. are by gun [1], in the UK, 50 of suicides are by hanging [2], and the US has about twice the suicide rate of UK. [3]

          [1] https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/fa... [cdc.gov]
          [2] h [manchester.ac.uk]

          • If you remove suicide by gun, the U.S. statistics look 'better', a lot better.

            Better, yes. A lot better? No. The US homicide rate is 2 to 5 times higher than European OECD countries.

    • Although, I suppose, if I were going to pick a likely alternative to Alaska in this regard, the immediately obvious choices would be Texas and Florida.

      Used to happen fairly often in Oregon.

    • You see this in rural NY, too. "Good ol' boys" - you know: morons - aren't specific to any one state.

  • "Won't anyone think of..." (Score:3)

    by Sebby ( 238625 ) on Wednesday October 01, 2025 @06:46PM (#65696680) Journal

    "...the Texan internet subscribers!!??"

  • Missing redundancy crashed the Internet in Texas (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ffkom ( 3519199 ) on Wednesday October 01, 2025 @06:46PM (#65696682)
    No, it wasn't really a bullet that "crashed the Internet in Texas", but the negligence of not having any redundant connection, as even 1990s best practices would have mandated.

    • Re:Missing redundancy crashed the Internet in Texa (Score:5, Interesting)

      by cusco ( 717999 ) <brian.bixbyNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Wednesday October 01, 2025 @07:00PM (#65696708)

      Was just coming here to post that, since it was my first thought. Of course there is an alternative almost as bad, once 1/3 of the internet connections in North America went down because of a farmer in the Midwest with a backhoe. The carrier (Alter.net IIRC) had two redundant fibers all right, but all three of them had been run in the same trench along the railroad right of way. Until it was fixed everything that crossed the US had to divert through Canada.

      • ... with a backhoe.

        The cost of hardening against malicious damage is astronomical, so it isn't attempted. Besides, the best answer to a malicious attack is multiple-site redundancy.

        Where were the warning signs/poles? Did the carrier not erect them? Plus, there should be protection against incidental damage. (Eg. a brick corridor offering limited 'hardening'.)

        Even then, I've heard that carriers 'lose' their cable, telling farmers to dig in the very spot holding the cable.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by cusco ( 717999 )

          There were probably signs, but a shocking percentage of people just plain don't read anything that they don't think they have to. It wasn't malicious damage, just stupidity.

      • The carrier (Alter.net IIRC) had two redundant fibers all right, but all three of them had been run in the same trench along the railroad right of way.

        I think the word you want isn't 'redundant' its 'additional'.

        There was no 'redundancy' when they dropped two additional fibers in the same trench...

      • Brother-In-Law did that one time. In-Law's farm had an old road running along the boundary that the county abandoned. BIL decided to dig a trench at the entrance to stop the local kids from using the road. 1st scoop of the backhoe pulled up a bunch of telephone wires.

        BIL was more than a bit chagrined since he was just finishing his bachelors degree in civil engineering at the time and knew damn well that he should have done the "call before you dig" thing.

      • Was just coming here to post that, since it was my first thought. Of course there is an alternative almost as bad, once 1/3 of the internet connections in North America went down because of a farmer in the Midwest with a backhoe. The carrier (Alter.net IIRC) had two redundant fibers all right, but all three of them had been run in the same trench along the railroad right of way. Until it was fixed everything that crossed the US had to divert through Canada.

        Yes, common cause failures. This is still a lack of basic competency for reliability engineering.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by evanh ( 627108 )

      You can bet this was done maliciously. Redundancy is not typically built against malicious activities.

    • No, it wasn't really a bullet that "crashed the Internet in Texas", but the negligence of not having any redundant connection

      It's a bit sad to think that the internet has gone from something that was originally designed to be capable of functioning after a nuclear attack to something that can now be disabled by one stray bullet.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Jeremi ( 14640 )

        It's a bit sad to think that the internet has gone from something that was originally designed to be capable of functioning after a nuclear attack to something that can now be disabled by one stray bullet.

        Then you'll be happy to find out that 99.9999% of the Internet was unaffected.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by mysidia ( 191772 )

      but the negligence of not having any redundant connection

      I don't think you can really say it is negligence, when it is design. Carrier backbone links do not have redundancy, and that has long been the general rule that these were never redundant. A single fiber break or line cut can break anyone's internet service, and has always been the case. That isone of the major reasons it is recommended for customers to have multihoming in the first place.

      Your home phone lines are the same. You are always

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by 4way ( 519502 )

        I don't think you can really say it is negligence, when it is design.

        Then it's negligence by design. These are solved problems (e.g., 1+1, 1:1), which do require investment. Maybe that's where the problem is.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mysidia ( 191772 )

          These are solved problems (e.g., 1+1, 1:1),
          These are Only solved problems if the customer is willing to pay the price tag on the solution.
          So few subscribers to comm services are willing to pay that the Default is zero redundancy.

          Like I said: You can order a protect circuit from your telecom provider, and you will have a level of redundancy for your service.
          But you are looking at three to four times the amount on the customer's monthly price for each of those protected lines.

          Of course that still does not

    • Redundancy does not always mean physical. In many cases not just for end user routing, but also for global internet backbones, the actual redundancy doesn't involve the fiber itself. No one in the world has built the internet for N+1 geographically. They recognise that the occasional outage can instead be managed by rerouting connections over other congested paths, or is usually limited enough in customer impact that they can deal with the minor outage for a few hours (all this was) and repair it.

      How much m

      • ISPs are quasi-monopolies and don't get to play by the same rules as most businesses. Most businesses have some form of redundancy so that single "event" doesn't stop them from doing business, otherwise it cost them money. ISPs obviously get your money and good luck with the service they provide. Don't like it, hope you live in a big city otherwise you options are sometimes them or go without Internet.

        The idea of the Internet was to have enough redundant paths that a single point of failure wouldn't knock o

        • This is nothing to do with monopolies or not. It's to do with infrastructure design. Running fibre in redundant ways is hard. Much of the world is setup in hub and spoke arrangement where major international data transit happens via key points in a country.

          The internet itself has plenty of redundant paths, even geographically diverse (e.g. satellite when a major subsea cable is cut), but that redundancy is not carried down to the final customer for good reason. It's the same electrically. We have redundant

    • There were redundant connections, but the people who could ride on that redundancy are not the same people who complained or were affected. Not all Spectrum subscribers were affected in the area. Odd that eh?

    • Incompetence. They have redundancy, and unlike AT&T they participate in peering arrangements at many IXPs. They just do not have employees capable of adjusting routing and when they finally do come up with some new routes, they are bizarre and linger for months after the incident. Every time they have a cable breakage in Dallas, PARTS of Austin (200 miles away) and other areas of Texas also lose service. It is like they have no clue how their network functions until something breaks and then they sta
  • So they can locate this patriotic, god-fearin’ Texan and given his well deserved bounty for gunning down a woke liberal fiber optic cable.

    I’m surprised this doesn’t happen more often.

    • A few months ago, some sort of organized group drove around Houston and smashed up a bunch of the green Comcast cable junction boxes that you see by the side of the road. You can tell it was an organized group due to the number of boxes smashed in a large geographical area (100 sq.mi) in a single night. A TV station got knocked off the air for a few minutes, and my own internet was out for the whole day. Saw many smashed up cable boxes by my house. There is 1 that still hasn't been repaired, guts are laying

      • That sounds like a disgruntled former employee. As your run-of-the-mill jerk, I might be malicious enough to smash a box that's nearby, but a bunch in a 100 sq mi area? No, that's determined malevolence; like someone got jilted, and they're getting their paybacks.

        • It would have been a group of disgruntled former employees in that case. Doesn't sound too "run of the mill".

  • Crazy there crazy here too (Score:4, Interesting)

    by AlanObject ( 3603453 ) on Wednesday October 01, 2025 @07:01PM (#65696710)

    Texas. An incident like this was inevitable, right?

    I am having a hard time comparing that story to one in my own neighborhood in California. A few years back our Internet and other network services were taken offline by some guy taking a chain saw to a telephone pole in the middle of the night while nobody was looking. It was interesting to see how many different telecommunications companies showed up to repair the damage, which was several hundred individual fibers.

    So they repaired it after working all night, then a week or two later it happens again. They were smart enough to plant a cam on the site and they ended up catching the guy who was doing it. Turns out he had gone pretty much the deep end and was convinced that Comcast was trying to control his mind and was trying to defend himself and family.

    I'll leave it to others here to opine on whether he had a case for that.

    So it can happen here or anywhere when someone goes crazy. In Texas, it is just normal.

  • Why is this news? Ever hear of the backhoe? (Score:3)

    by Marful ( 861873 ) on Wednesday October 01, 2025 @07:49PM (#65696832)
    Backhoes and the all-mighty shovel have caused more outages than just about anything else.

  • Single point of failure .. (Score:3)

    by Mirnotoriety ( 10462951 ) on Wednesday October 01, 2025 @08:21PM (#65696874)
    "The outage stemmed from a fiber optic cable that was damaged by a stray bullet"

    Wouldn't it be a good idea to have more than one fiber optic cable providing Internet to the area.

    • "The outage stemmed from a fiber optic cable that was damaged by a stray bullet"
        Wouldn't it be a good idea to have more than one fiber optic cable providing Internet to the area.

      How much would you pay for that? And when formulating your answer, consider how long your internet outages have been this year in total. How much more would you pay to improve it?

      Geographical redundancy is what is known in the industry as "fucking expensive".

      • > How much would you pay for that? .. Geographical redundancy is what is known in the industry as "fucking expensive".

        It's call peering. you provide a back-up route for other companies and they in turn provide a back-up route for yours. Not acceptable having internet, phone, and TV services lost for several hours.

        • It's call peering. you provide a back-up route for other companies and they in turn provide a back-up route for yours. Not acceptable having internet, phone, and TV services lost for several hours.

          a) Peering works only at a certain level in infrastructure, at some point you own a connection that no other company provides any redundant path for.
          b) Peering doesn't mean geographical redundancy. In fact in most cases bulk fiber is geographically co-located by major providers meaning all your peers suffer the same problem.
          c) Peering's primary benefit is for network load management, at no point do peers build up in a way to offer N+1 capacity to provide full service for their other peers.

  • Thoughts and prayers, I guess?

  • Is bad planning, no redundancy, and doing things cheaper than possible. And that should get the respective C-levels some time behind bars as this is critical infrastructure they are half-assing.

  • Would now be designing bullets tuned to taking out fibre optics :O

  • Was designed to survive a nuclear war, maybe spectrum missed the memo of multi-point routing.

  • Full Onionization (Score:4, Funny)

    by dskoll ( 99328 ) on Wednesday October 01, 2025 @09:06PM (#65696968) Homepage

    Sorry, this story is not good enough for The Onion. Let's fix the headline:

    "Florida Man Fires Bullet that Crashes the Internet in Texas. ChatGPT Sends Thoughts and Prayers."

  • If this cannot lead to gun control legislation, what can?
  • So let me get this straight, one fibre cable gets damaged and the internet goes down in large areas of a state? Now I'm not afan of fiering people for making misstakes, but the ones responsible for such a grairung single point of failiur in essential infrastructure ( this is 2025 I have internet on that list) needs to find a kess important job, or at least have a few weekes oayed leave for mandatory trainging.

  • Funny story (Score:3)

    by bobthesungeek76036 ( 2697689 ) on Thursday October 02, 2025 @08:03AM (#65697752)
    I work for a LARGE defense contractor that has a facility in the Philly area. We had a network outage the day after the Super Bowl earlier this year. The cause: A bullet hitting a fiber bundle.

  • "target" shooting (Score:3)

    by bferrell ( 253291 ) on Thursday October 02, 2025 @10:21AM (#65698030) Homepage Journal

    when telegraph lines with glass/ceramic insulators on poles went up, people used them for targets
    when T1 lines went up with repeater boxes about every mile went up, those became targets too.
    What do you wanna bet this is what happened here?

  • "Spectrum told 404 Media that it didn't have any further details to share about the incident so we have no idea how the company learned a bullet hit its equipment, where the bullet was found, and if the police are involved."

    No idea? Really? Let me see if I can figure it out. Hmmm.

    Visual inspection? Seeing a damn bullet hole or even the bullet?

    Next time, instead of looking stupid, just say Spectrum hasn't provided any further details.

    Also, my grammar checker and my education say that you're mis

  • Nice shootin', Tex!

  • Y'all tell Spectrum thanks for finding my missing bullet. .
    Lost it while practicing with my AK on that day's rack of
    empty Lone Star beer cans in my condo's small back yard.
    I knew I missed but never could find any messed up turf
    where it hit or Rick-O'Shayed off the ground.
    Lordy! I was 100% addled about where it might have
    ended up as I staggered 'round huntin' for it.
    Sorry for all the damage and the internet outage.
    But thoughts and prayers! Thoughts and prayers!

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