My Dog Ate My Homework!

I was just reading through this article this morning:

Rats take down Kiwi telecoms
By AAP
24 June 2005

Rats gnawing through cable helped cripple telecommunications services across New Zealand for more than four hours, an investigation has found.

But the rodents will go unpunished as the telco instead goes after the humans who were unwitting collaborators in the shutdown.

Telephone, mobile, Internet and eftpos services affecting about 100,000 customers were lost on Monday and the nation's stock exchange closed for most of the trading day because of the outage.

The interruption occurred after two service pipelines on the North Island were knocked out within hours of each other -- one by a power company post-hole digger, the other by industrious rodents.

The rats attacked cable on a bridge north of Wellington protected by a steel duct.

"Rodents being rodents, they gnaw at those entry points, they burrow underground, they find a way in," Telecom New Zealand general manager of network delivery Steve Fuller told the New Zealand Herald.

Powerless to take action against the rats for the "unavoidable" damage, Telecom is seeking compensation from the electricity company it says is responsible for knocking out the other pipeline, eliminating backup services.

This article reminds me about what happened in Thailand a few years ago. During the course of the week, there were numerous Internet disruption. From the first occurence, I heard that some shark or marine animal managed to sever the underwater cables that connected the Thai Internet Connection to the world. After a week, the problem was fixed, though it happened again the next week when Internet service went back to a crawl. This time, I heard that some administrators were complaining about crabs eating the cables. Talking about it, notice the similarity? Somehow it does make "my dog ate my homework excuse" sounds credible :P