November 2023 Telecom Crash in Australia

I didn't see coverage of this in the US media. Instead, I saw it linked from Tactical Wisdom's X feed.

https://tactical-wisdom.com/2023/11/08/telecom-crash-in-australia/

Read the whole thing, it has an excellent discussion of immediate effects along with secondary and tertiary effects of a major Internet/telecom outage.

Among the things that we take for granted that won't work if communication lines are down include:

• Bank withdrawals or deposits, whether in-person or via an ATM.
• Purchasing groceries, gas, or basically anything if the store's point of sale system requires a functional connection.
• Cell phones, landlines, and Internet, obviously.
• Uber / Lyft / GrubHub / Door Dash, etc.
• Stuff that uses the Internet to augment other services. E.g., Google Maps or Waze, which use your phone's Internet to download maps in real time to work with its built-in GPS.
• Government services including 911.

Now think of how much everything you do everyday is dependent on that telco/ISP connection.

Long-term readers may recall that I work for a very large ISP/telco. I started out supporting our optical transport network then transitioned into operations for our product development labs. This stuff is very complicated with a million spinning, intertwined parts. I've seen outages caused by things ranging from Bubba shooting up exposed cable nodes with a shotgun to router configuration foul ups.

Aside from all that much of the physical infrastructure (fiber lines, coaxial lines, etc.) is by necessity running through publicly accessible areas.

There's been a lot of speculating in the past couple of years that we'll eventually get into a war with China, or that if we attack Iran they would asymmetric attacks against targets in CONUS. IMO, they'd be foolish not to if either conflict went hot.

Cyber attacks are a real threat against all the large providers and something they deal with constantly. In the event of a shooting war they'd ramp up immeasurably. These would include range from physical attacks to hacking and denial of service.

Go read the article I linked above and do some prepping so you can weather at least a short term interruption of Internet and telco services.