This morning I had a bit of a rude awakening. No, the cat didn’t tackle me in my sleep… nor did Chel. When I went to check my email this morning (it’s a compulsion, I know), I found that I didn’t have connectivity. Ok, I’ll try the infrequent DSL Bridge Power Cycle; no dice. Maybe it’s the Router; nope. I tried to use a neighbor’s WiFi to check my ISP’s MOTD to see if they have anything to say; the neighbor seemed to be experiencing the same outage. I grabbed my mobile to check see if there was anything on sonic.net’s site via the mobile browser; it didn’t have service. Weird. I managed wrest the television remote out of Chel’s hand see if the morning news had anything to say. I only caught the last 8 or so seconds of a bumper-piece that said that “…both Verizon and AT&T were attempting to restore service as soon as possible.”

Great, if the news station is Monterey was saying this….? I decided to just forget about trying to get my morning podcast and head into work. I picked up a morning coffee at Lulu Carpenter’s. Alisa, the very barista, mentioned that AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile were all down and that their shop didn’t have land-line service either. Totally weird.

On my commute in my mobile service came back for a moment somewhere around the summit on 17 (I got ‘new email’ notification), but was gone again when I tried to make a call. When I got into work, I punched up Sonic.net MOTD and they said:

At approximately 2:30 AM today, AT&T lost ATM connectivity to the Santa Cruz area, causing all DSL in that area to be non-functional. AT&T has no ETR at this time, but we are in contact with them and will update as soon as they have any new information.

I did some more digging and I found an article on one of Monterey’s local new station’s website, KSBW, that said AT&T was claiming “…the outage is a result of one of AT&T’s fiber optic cables being cut.”

What!? Did I read that correctly? A single Fibre Cable was serving Santa Cruz? And what do they mean “it was cut”? Was this a malicious act? Did some tech get a little overenthusiastic with a pair of dykes? WTF!?

They better get that fixed pronto. I can live without Internet for a day or so, but I really don’t like being without phone service… that said, I’m guessing it’ll be fixed around noon, given the amount of money they’ve got to be loosing from “five-nines” service contract penalties alone.

UPDATE: Yes, both land-line and mobile service was out in Santa Cruz this morning. It would seem that cell towers are just stupid slaves that go dark when connectivity is lost… no local phone calls for you!

When I got to work, I tried calling Michelle at home (AT&T local) and got an “all circuits busy” recorded message; the call to her mobile went straight to voice mail. My parent’s landline (Verizon, I think) gave me a fast-busy, “not in service” tone. I have no idea the state of Comcast’s Internet Service this morning… but does it matter?

UPDATE 2: KSBW revised their story. They’re seemingly confirming the land-line, mobile and Internet outage in Santa Cruz was a result of a single Fibre Cable being cut. And apparently AT&T has a twitter page.