The sabotage of a terrestrial cable in the south of France had repercussions on the world Internet traffic.
It took more or less 24 hours for everything to be back in order and the express intervention of many technicians. Between Wednesday evening and Thursday evening of last week, the intervention will have allowed to restore the functioning of the Internet network on a global scale, proving that the interconnection of networks is not an empty word and that the flapping of a butterfly's wings in Brazil can really cause a tornado in Texas... Well, at least on the network of networks.
Although the exact circumstances of the incident are not known, everything leads us to believe that it was a malicious act and that saboteurs deliberately cut a terrestrial fiber cable in the vicinity of Aix-en-Provence, near Marseille. This act had direct repercussions on three major lines of Internet traffic in Europe: the Marseille-Barcelona, Marseille-Lyon and Marseille-Milan connections. In reality, the consequences were much more global and, as Zcaler points out, it caused malfunctions " to Asia, Europe, the United States and potentially other parts of the world " because of the nature of the Internet itself.
Indeed, because of the problems encountered on the major Amsterdam-Paris-Lyon-Marseille axis, every connection that uses all or part of this "information highway" is affected and, by ricochet, so are the connections using these affected connections. Zcaler said that " due to the cable outage, customers may experience packet loss and/or latency for websites and applications that use this path .
According to Clubic's information, the investigation seems to be heading towards a voluntary act of saboteurs who would have "lifted the cast iron cover of a telecom chamber hidden in the road, before cutting the sheath housing the fiber cables". An act that is not so complicated for major consequences and while geopolitical tensions are increasing around the world, we think that the network on which a good part of our existence is based is only held by a (big) wire... easily severable.
