This seemingly funny yet true story was recently revealed by Google’s Vice President of Technical Infrastructure, Urs Hölzle, on his personal Twitter account.
Recently, Google discovered that its ultra-fast fiber optic cable running through Oregon was frequently experiencing some signal loss issues. These are overhead fiber optic lines that share infrastructure with high-voltage power lines.
Normally, these overhead fiber optic lines are vulnerable to damage from causes like storms, blizzards, or fallen trees. However, even Google’s engineers could not have anticipated that one day a herd of cows would cause the entire data center of the company located in Oregon to lose Internet access.
“This time, we discovered a new cause of damage: The fiber optic line, although it fell to the ground, was still functioning normally. But recently, a farmer began grazing a herd of cows nearby. And whenever they stepped on the fiber optic cable, the network would become unstable,” Hölzle shared on Twitter.
Initially, Google could not identify the reason for the continuous network interruptions. Until Google sent personnel to the field to investigate, the company’s engineers discovered that the herd of cows wandering nearby was the culprit behind the incident!
In fact, power and Internet infrastructure in the United States has been damaged numerous times due to animals. Some power lines have experienced short circuits or fires when squirrels, snakes, and other creatures run across the lines.
Google itself has also been a victim of an incident caused by sharks – animals that are all too familiar to the Vietnamese online community after frequent ‘cable-biting’ incidents. In 2014, Google had to send divers to repair and reinforce an undersea cable after it was bitten through by a shark. Recently, a crocodile even managed to break into Google’s data center in South Carolina, causing quite a panic among the staff there.
Source: 9to5google