Credit: ZME Science/Midjourney.
Last Friday afternoon, thousands of Texans found themselves yanked offline. Remote workers were booted out of meetings, students were cut off from assignments, and businesses froze mid-transaction. By evening, it became clear this wasn’t your average service glitch. This was clearly a hardware problem, and the funny thing is, it was all because of a stray bullet.
Welcome to Texas, I guess.
According to Spectrum, a stray round tore through a fiber optic cable and left about 25,000 people without internet, TV, or phone service for several hours. Repair teams scrambled, and most customers were back online within three hours.
A Bullet Takes Down Dallas
The outage stretched across the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, spilling into cities like Irving, Arlington, and Plano. At first, it was just a handful of reports on DownDetector. By 1 p.m., the complaints piled up, with frustrated posts flooding forums and social media. One Reddit user summed up the chaos: “Right in the middle of my meetings 😒” to which another quipped, “This is the worst!”
Spectrum’s repair crews worked quickly once the damage was found. A spokesperson told FOX 4 News: “Our teams worked quickly to make the necessary repairs and get customers back online. We apologize for the inconvenience.”
The exact location of the bullet strike hasn’t been disclosed. With Texas’s overlapping police jurisdictions and a whole lot of firearms, figuring out which trigger pull cut the internet may prove impossible. And probably no one cares either.
When the Physical Internet Meets Physical Danger
Fiber optic cables are the invisible veins of modern life. They carry pulses of light across cities, continents, and oceans, moving everything from cat memes to emergency calls. They’re usually buried underground to protect against weather, accidents, or vandalism. But in many places, including Texas, some lines run overhead — thin threads strung on poles, exposed to the hazards of daily life. In this case, hazards like stray bullets.
This wasn’t the first time gunfire knocked out internet service. In 2022, Comcast’s network in Oakland, California, went down after someone allegedly fired 17 rounds into the air, severing fiber lines. Nearly 30,000 people lost service, and the blackout hit right before an NFL game. “While this isn’t completely uncommon, it is pretty rare, but we know it when we see it,” Comcast spokesperson Joan Hammel told Data Center Dynamics at the time.
More recently, in 2025, Spectrum customers in Columbus, Ohio, endured a two-day outage after stray rounds damaged cables. Just a few months later, shotgun blasts took down service in another Ohio town. And in June, a separate Spectrum incident involved shotgun fire ripping through lines.
Dallas’s blackout is just the latest in this bizarre category of infrastructure sabotage — not deliberate hacking or terrorism, but stray bullets from the sky.
Events like these highlight why telecom companies bury as much cable as they can. But burying is expensive. In sprawling cities with patchwork regulations, overhead lines remain a cheaper, faster solution (sometimes 10x times less expensive than underground cables). And as long as fiber optic cables hang in the air, they’ll remain vulnerable not just to storms or construction mishaps, but to something as random as gunfire.