As some of you may have heard, there was some serious industrial espionage yesterday in the Bay Area.  Vandals broke into two infrastructure conduit manhole covers and hacked through the Urban Ring for the Bay Area - cutting it in four places.

This act was done to take down all the wireless calls for both AT&T and Verizon and interupted MOST of the data centers and hosting facilitiies in teh Bay Area!  911 servcies were down, all cell phones from verizona nd AT&T were down in the South Bay area - and many many hosting facilities were completely 'off air!'

Most of the large tech companies have redundant systems running around the world, but the smaller players - like my company - were taken down as we do NOT have redundant systems running in other cities!

So we were off line for 10 hours!

AT&T is offering $100k for info leading to the arrest of these folks and it's clear they knew what they were doing. They strategically cut the  urban ring who's ONLY purpose is to inter-connect between all the OTHER urban rings and trunk lines that fan out across the country.

So ALL traffic coming into and out of the Bay Area was effected.

ALL traffic.

Quite a day yesterday.

Real wake up call for redundancy.  And in true insider blogsphere action - turns out AT&T used Twitter during the crisis.

:-)