Mysterious bullet hole leads to Comcast outage in West Seattle

[Joanne98]

Comcast has experienced its fair share of outages in the Seattle area recently, including a cable TV disruption earlier this month and an Internet outage last month. But the Comcast service disruption which occurred in West Seattle yesterday may be the strangest of them all.

Service went down for about 2,500 Comcast customers after a bullet hole was discovered to have severed a fiber line. Technicians for the company were able to quickly resolve the problem. In a Tweet, Comcast representatives admitted that an outage tied to a bullet hole is "pretty unusual."

In a follow-up, the company said they may never know why it occurred.

http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2010/11/mysterious-bullet-hole-leads-to.html

[JBoy]

1. Sounds like Comcast is trying to hide the bullet-hole part of the story.

[L0oniX]

2. Maybe this will catch on.

[Paper Roses]

3. Comcast, I believe someone out there is sending you a message.

Although I do not believe a bullet will solve anything, it certainly is a novel way of letting them know how unpopular they are.

[Edweird]

4. The $64,000 dollar question: Was this just a fluke or an attack on Comcast specifically?

[lumberjack_jeff]

5. "Kill your TV"?

Better yet, kill everyone's TV.

[NightWatcher]

7. diagrams, diagrams. where should we aim?

[KharmaTrain]

6. "Disgruntled" Employee

Remember, Comcast uses "contractors"...whom they hire and fire as needed. Sounds like the person who did this was familiar with the distribution system.

[FarCenter]

8. Vandalism by firearm is a common problem with communications networks

Equipment to be installed outside used to have specific requirements for resistance to various calibers.

Resistance to wildlife damage is another problem - squirrels, gophers, etc.