So dependent on that link, cannot function without it.

Learn yourself some stuff

Of course society is "dependent" on it. Same reason we're dependant on roads and airports, for much the same reasons.

I pretty much had to threaten to use a hacksaw a few years ago to get them to at least fill in THEIR cuts, much less to any actual maintenance on the R-o-W.

a potential problem, because it's a complex mess that is probably impossible for a anyone to have a complete understanding of what's going on. So even the people who routinely muck around in that area of the network may not have the big picture view of everything. I don't even think the superstars could spot everything.

There is also the possibility of a misconfiguration that caused this. A very long time ago I was working on the IP engineering side of a cable company, and we had a major outage due to a fiber line being severed (construction was the cause in this case, I believe) The were other physical routes that could be taken, but due to a routing misconfiguration, those alternate paths went unused. To fix it, a short-term fix of adding a floating static route was implemented, with the intent to come up with a more permanent solution later. I wouldn't be surprised if that quick fix is still there.

After working with more than few service provider networks (including CenturyLinks), I'm amazed any this stuff works as well as it does.

... but it doesn't take a genius, just a thorough effort ($$$) to document and test what you have and more $$$ to complete the necessary redundancy.

If it's a misconfiguration, then testing was inadequate, probably because they tried to do it on the cheap.

a single line cut should not leave entire states helpless!

You might reach a base station or whatever via the air, but unless all the backhauls are made wireless, you're still going to have your traffic sent over fiber at some point. Someone cuts that link, then you're pretty much screwed if the network isn't designed or configured correctly to handle it.

The current Iridium satellite wifi maxes out at 0.2Mbit, and the "next generation" system going online this year only does 1.5Mbit...pathetically slow by modern broadband standards. It's really only useful in places where NO other options exist.

The fact this was able to completely knock off large amount of customers shows how screwed up their networks are. Most the problems I had was dealing with all the different networks they acquired from the various companies.

Seems strange there was no redundancy for this area. Just the ability to say we use fiber-optic.

Also in the article (poorly written) technicians had to inspect the line mile by mile. That is non-sense, once a cable is cut it becomes a mirror at the end, thus a light pulse can determine the cable length. Of course, we are not suppose to know that.