Terrorist attacks lead to data and power outage in London?

So our London office just had a few major incidences this week. On Tuesday a fiber optic line servicing 81 businesses was cut severing all phone and data service to said buildings.

Then, today, we lost all power to the building after an electrical explosion led to a power outage affecting many businesses in the same region.
news.bbc.co.uk...

This basically led to an all out freak-out this week in our IT department. This is a new office and the disaster recovery systems hadn't been fully implemented. So, in essence, our UK office was dead in the water.

Of course there is no actual evidence that these incidences are related, and if they are, that it was a terrorist attack in any way. But it makes one wonder. Why bother bombing innocent people when much more damage can arise from simply cutting off data service to dozens of businesses at a time? I think it would be a far more effective, and less deadly form of terrorism.

Im sorry, but I think it is only fair to change the title of this thread, although the one now may give many more views and make it look exciting.

However, even your own link states that it was a drilling accident and does not mention anything about terror.

I was at work 1½ km from Tottenham Court today and didn't even hear more than usual police activity, which one would suspect would be the case if indeed a terrorist attack had occured.

I'm sorry, don't mean to bust your chops, just think the title is a little more than misleading...


Regarding your last question:
You have a valid point. In light of cut cables in the middleeast we have seen what kind of damage this could do.
But wouldn't something like this be more of a precursor to a "real" attack?
First blacken out the enemy's communication then go for either an attack to create civilian casualties or an attack designed to render the enemy's defences useless or crippled.

However since we're not talking about a bombing run by a plane etc. but a city "job" then I wouldn't even bother about communication lines if I was a terrorist. Just strap a vest to 5 guys and tell em to run into the 5 biggest tube stations / turist attractions. That would create some profound chaos.

[edit on 7/2/08 by flice]

Originally posted by flice
Im sorry, but I think it is only fair to change the title of this thread, although the one now may give many more views and make it look exciting.

That's why I added the question mark at the end. We still have no idea why the fiber lines in the London area were cut, so I think it's still fair to speculate at this time that it might possibly be terrorist related until I hear otherwise.

I know it's been terrorizing us for the past few days.

Could be tit for tat. Someone cuts lines to the Arab/Muslim/Indian world. Then, a response comes cutting a cable in London and blowing up something else... Yes, one could put these all together as part of the worldwide chess game.

I used to work for a telco managing these kinds of circtuits and this sort of stuff used to happen all of the time. In order for a terrorist attack on such infrastructure to affect many, many people (usually the goal of such attacks), they would have to take out lots of points - preferably several landing stations for undersea cables or several major exchanges.

The fact is, any large company that has its act together has redundant circuits with diverse paths, hosted by different carriers. Many large companies also have business continuity centers (empty offices with PC's and other infrastructure) at a different location to move all of their staff to if their primary place of business goes offline for an extended period.

Several carriers had major exchanges in NYC under the World Trade Centre, and the resulting chaos from having these exchanges offline brought Wall Street to a grinding halt and had a major impact on the world's economy. Every business that was in the WTC and didn't have proper disaster recovery and BCP procedures in place is now out of business. It's been a boon for the IT industry.

[edit on 7-2-2008 by Snappahead]

reply to post by Rasobasi420


Do you have a link to anything news worthy regardin the fiber cut?
And in this case... I would speculate that it wasn't a terrorist attack until heard otherwise, but again, that makes this thread a little less interesting.

I mean, you wouldn't cry murder right away if you saw a dead man in the street and then blame the guy nearest to you.

Anyways, hope you work out those fiber probs. Been having a great deal of random dcs on both phone and internet ourself for a while now. Incompetent BT can't figure out why -.-

Originally posted by flice
reply to post by Rasobasi420

 

Do you have a link to anything news worthy regardin the fiber cut?

No, nothing newsworthy, but it definitely happened, and we're expecting a Feb 15th fix date. In the mean time we have all traffic routing through our Providence and New York offices since the MPLS connections between sites remained functional.

I know it's not likely a terrorist thing. I just realized how much of an impact a cut fiber can have on business and economic infrastructure on a larger scale. I know 9/11 had a similar situation (100 times over), but I wasn't working in IT then.

Some poor sod who is employed by a contractor working on the Crossrail Link drilled through a HT cable. He is in hospital with extensive major burns