Now I guess they had to say something, but I’m pretty sure the people that are going to do this sort of thing weren’t going to be paying attention anyway……

“While beavers are clearly a broadband menace, they’ve got nothing on random gunfire. Back in 2005, we noted how several users lost DSL connectivity due to “random gunfire to a aerial wire,” according to news outlets in New Mexico. Qwest’s advice to locals at the time was “don’t shoot guns randomly.”

That advice wasn’t heeded this week in Cleveland, where a Level3 fiber optic cable outage (which many of you experienced first hand while trying to reach us) was blamed on a trigger-happy local:

Internet service providers in the U.S. experienced a service slowdown Monday after fiber-optic cables near Cleveland were apparently sabotaged by gunfire. . . When technicians pulled up the affected cable, it appeared to have been shot. “Somebody had been shooting with a gun or a shotgun into the cable,” said Anders Olausson, a TeliaSonera spokesman.”

I guess target practice takes priority….