{"id":52554,"date":"2025-10-03T03:04:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-03T03:04:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/52554\/"},"modified":"2025-10-03T03:04:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-03T03:04:08","slug":"a-single-bullet-cut-25000-people-off-the-internet-in-texas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/52554\/","title":{"rendered":"A Single Bullet Cut 25,000 People Off the Internet in Texas"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Credit: ZME Science\/Midjourney.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t your average service glitch. This was clearly a hardware problem, and the funny thing is, it was all because of a stray bullet. <\/p>\n

Welcome to Texas, I guess.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

A Bullet Takes Down Dallas<\/p>\n

The outage stretched across<\/a> the Dallas\u2013Fort 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<\/a> the chaos: \u201cRight in the middle of my meetings \ud83d\ude12\u201d to which another quipped, \u201cThis is the worst!\u201d<\/p>\n

Spectrum\u2019s repair crews worked quickly once the damage was found. A spokesperson told FOX 4 News: \u201cOur teams worked quickly to make the necessary repairs and get customers back online. We apologize for the inconvenience.\u201d<\/p>\n

The exact location of the bullet strike hasn\u2019t been disclosed. With Texas\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

When the Physical Internet Meets Physical Danger<\/p>\n

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\u2019re usually buried underground to protect against weather, accidents, or vandalism. But in many places, including Texas, some lines run overhead \u2014 thin threads strung on poles, exposed to the hazards of daily life. In this case, hazards like stray bullets.<\/p>\n

This wasn\u2019t the first time gunfire knocked out internet service. In 2022, Comcast\u2019s network in Oakland, California, went down after someone allegedly fired 17 rounds<\/a> into the air, severing fiber lines. Nearly 30,000 people lost service, and the blackout hit right before an NFL game. \u201cWhile this isn\u2019t completely uncommon, it is pretty rare, but we know it when we see it,\u201d Comcast spokesperson Joan Hammel told Data Center Dynamics at the time.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

Dallas\u2019s blackout is just the latest in this bizarre category of infrastructure sabotage \u2014 not deliberate hacking or terrorism, but stray bullets from the sky.<\/p>\n

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\u2019ll remain vulnerable not just to storms or construction mishaps, but to something as random as gunfire.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Credit: ZME Science\/Midjourney. Last Friday afternoon, thousands of Texans found themselves yanked offline. Remote workers were booted out…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":52555,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[36558,7738,85,123,46,125,5727],"class_list":["post-52554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-internet","tag-bullet","tag-guns","tag-il","tag-internet","tag-israel","tag-technology","tag-texas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52554","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52554"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52554\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/52555"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}