A stray bullet cut through a Spectrum fiber line on Friday, knocking an undisclosed number of Texans offline.
ISP Spectrum told customers in the Dallas-Fort Worth area that services were down in a post on X, which judging from the comments from customers isn’t an unusual occurrence. Charter, which owns Spectrum, has confirmed that a bullet was responsible and sliced through a key data cable that serviced the area.
“The outage stemmed from a fiber optic cable that was damaged by a stray bullet,” a spokesperson told The Register on Wednesday. “Our teams worked quickly to make the necessary repairs and get customers back online. We apologize for the inconvenience.”
Charter declined to provide the number of customers who lost internet. However, according to the Dallas Morning News, outage site Downdetector (which does not list historical outages) showed nearly 25,000 reports of lost service Friday afternoon. The newspaper reported that other cities, including Irving, Plano, Arlington, Austin, and San Antonio, were also affected.
The spokesperson also opined that people shouldn’t treat Downdetector as gospel, while declining to enumerate how many of its customers were taken down.
It’s most likely, based on past cases, that the fiber optic cable in question wasn’t buried but strung up on poles and was thus easier to damage. And the ISP has considerable experience in gun-related internet problems.
This is the third firearms-related outage problem Spectrum has had in the last 12 months. In June, an Ohio customer reported more than a week without service after several shotgun blasts damaged a cable line. Spectrum told reporters that it was an isolated incident and it hadn’t informed the police.
The ISP suffered another gunfire-related outage in Ohio last New Year’s Eve. Residents in Columbus rang in 2025 with stray rounds that struck Spectrum’s fiber, leaving customers in Hilltop offline for 43 hours and cutting a circuit that knocked local traffic cameras offline for over a day.
Sadly, antisocial Americans who don’t care that what goes up must come down have a habit of firing off rounds to see in the New Year. As we reported in 2008, partiers peppered Comcast’s lines with bullets, causing it to lose data service in southeast Memphis.
Oakland can get a bit shooty – Click to enlarge
Many American ISPs have such bullet botheration, and not just in gun-friendly states like Ohio and Texas. In 2022, Californian NFL fans watching the Los Angeles Rams and the San Francisco 49ers had their viewing interrupted when someone shot up overhead cables that Comcast Xfinity owned in Oakland.
The majority of gun owners in the Land of the Free are responsible shooters who recognize it’s a tool, not a toy. But a few are not and while the odds of hitting a cable are slim, it clearly happens too often. Then again, there are worse things than accidental outages. ®