UnNews:Internet outage in Georgia explained
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| Internet outage in Georgia explained | 
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10 April 2011
TBILISI, Georgia -- An event on March 28 that shut down the Internet in much of Georgia and all of Armenia for hours has been explained. Authorities say 75-year-old Aiyastan Shakaryan severed a fiber optic cable that ran parallel to a railroad.
When Ms. Shakaryan realized that the cable was not copper, which she was scavenging to sell, she left both halves of the cable at the site and contented herself with hacksawing and removing some of the rail.
Georgia spokesman Zurab Gvenetadze said Ms. Shakaryan could get three years for property destruction. But she tells television channel Imedi that she is not guilty. "When I saw it was not copper, I duct taped the two ends back together, good as new."
Anush Begloyan, a spokesman for Armenia's largest ISP, said that the incident suggests it might have been a mistake to route the nation's entire Internet traffic through a single cable with no alternate routes.
U.S. officials say there are only three places in America where the nation's entire Internet traffic travels through a single cable--all, coincidentally, in the state of Georgia. However, each site is protected by web-cams, and any mischief could be monitored from anywhere on the web.
Sources[edit]
- Staff "Georgia alleges scavenger, 75, shut down Internet". Associated Press, April 8, 2011