Excerpt from an article by Jimmy Sengenberger, Perspectives Editor at the Regis University Highlander

Vandalism may have been the cause of one recent internet outage on (Regis University's) campus, says Erich Delcamp, director of infrastructure and operations. Another outage less than two weeks later was a confirmed accident.  On Monday, Oct. 25, and again on Saturday, Nov. 6, Regis's main campus internet and phone connections were rendered inoperative by serious cuts to two important fiber-optic cables serviced by Level 3 Communications, one of Regis's primary Internet Service Providers (ISP).

"This is a pretty large fiber-optic cable," said Delcamp, who is responsible for overseeing the system, networking and telecom teams for Regis's Information Technology Services's (ITS). "They call it an OC-192, which is one of the backbones of the internet, the kind of fiber-optic that ISPs use to talk...to big groups of customers," he said.

At first they thought it was due to construction, [but] it turned out that somebody had actually cut open a manhole cover, gotten down into the manhole and severed the fiber-optic cable," Delcamp said. "It looks like an act of vandalism; we really couldn't understand how that would happen outside of just straight-up vandalism."

More...