Cattle stepping on optical cables, Internet problem

The joke turned out to be true, just recently revealed by Google’s Vice President of Infrastructure Engineering, Urs Hölzle, on his personal Twitter page.

Accordingly, recently Google discovered its super-fast optical cable line that goes through the territory of Oregon often encountered some signal loss problems. These are overhead fiber optic cable lines, sharing the same infrastructure with high voltage lines.

Typically, these overhead fiber optic cables are easily damaged by causes such as tornadoes, snowstorms or fallen trees. However, even Google engineers did not expect that, there is a day a herd of cows could cause the entire data center of this company located in Oregon state … lost the Internet.

Google’s fiber optic cable line when dropped to the ground has been stepped on by a herd of cows

“This time, we discovered a new cause of the damage: The fiber optic cable, although dropped to the ground, was still working. But recently a farmer started grazing a herd of cows. And whenever they step on an optical cable, the network flickers, “Hölzle shared on Twitter.

Initially, Google could not detect the reason why the network is constantly interrupted. Until Google sent people to the field to look, the company’s engineers discovered that the cows are wandering nearby are the culprits causing the problem!

In fact, electricity and Internet infrastructure in the US has been damaged many times with the main cause from animals. Some power lines were shorted, burnt when squirrels, snakes and other creatures ran on the line.

Google itself is also a ‘victim’ of an incident caused by sharks – an animal that is so familiar with Vietnamese netizens after frequent cable-biting missions. In 2014, Google sent divers to repair and reinforce submarine cables after sharks were bitten off. Recently, a crocodile even broke into Google’s data center in the state of South Carolina, causing employees here to panic.

Refer to 9to5google