How a Grandma Broke An Entire Country’s Internet
In the world we live in today, lots of things are broken. President Trump’s campaign promises, the US Justice system — and, at one point, all of Armenia’s internet.
On the evening of the 28th of March, 2011, 90% of Armenia’s 3 million-strong population found themselves offline. But, how exactly did this happen?
It’s not as if a crazy 75-year-old pensioner went digging for copper right next to a random railway track and accidentally cut a copper fiber-optic cable, connecting Georgia to Armenia, which consequently took most of Armenia offline and resulted in a national catastrophe. Oh…wait, that’s exactly what happened.
So…let’d dive into the logistics.
Our favorite 75-year old, Hayastan Shakarian, lives in a village called Armazi, which is actually right next to the Georgian capital, Tbilisi. Georgia relies on the Caucasus cable system to connect it to the rest of the world. This cable transports over 12.6 terabytes of data each second and stretches across the black sea.
But, you also need to have land-based cables to transmit the data from the Caucasus cable to regular buildings across Georgia. The problem is that land-based cables are a bit more complicated. You need to get permission to dig through millions of people’s land, in order to plant it in the ground. The cable wouldn’t be able to go under rocks or any other physical barriers. It would disrupt everyday life and would just be disastrous. Almost as bad of an idea as towing an iceberg to the middle east.
But…imagine there was a long strip of land, stretching across Georgia, all the property of one government-owned entity. Say hello to Georgian Railways.
Hence, the government, rather creatively, came up with Georgian Railway Telecom. This company owns the fiber-optic cable, buried underground, right next to the railway track. Georgian Railway Telecom also provides internet to other neighboring countries like Armenia.
Our 75-year-old pensioner was pretty poor, so she scavenged and sold copper for some extra side cash. So, on March 28th, 2011, she began her copper scavenger hunt, as normal, in the middle of the forest. And, she somehow made her way to a nearby train track.
Well, she must have seen something promising because…one spade strike later, over 3 million people let out a collective sigh across Georgia and Armenia.
At that moment, a large portion of Georgia and nearly all of Armenia went offline.
For 12 hours, companies couldn’t send emails, hospitals couldn’t upload patient files, and no-one could search up ‘why were cornflakes invented’, which is apparently searched up 550,000 times a month.
Over 3 million people were running around panicking. And, devastatingly, they couldn’t even get on Twitter to complain.
Eventually, the telecom company isolated the incident to Armazi, fixed the cable, and the perpetrator, Hayastan Shakarian, was arrested.
Well, because you’ve read this story, you know now how to shut down an entire country’s internet. All you need to do is go digging for copper around random railway tracks.
