Communications of the ACM
Canadian Internet Outage Attributed to Beaver
For several years, the Website Cyber Squirrel 1 tracked power outages attributed to critters. The site stopped counting back in 2019, but by then it had tracked over 2,500 incidents of animal related blackouts—roughly half of them squirrel-related.
Credit: Jeremy Hynes
Some residents of northwestern Canada lost network coverage for eight hours last week in an outage that has since been attributed to nature's architect: the beaver.
BC Hydro official Bob Gammer told CTV an aspen tree knocked out a Telus fiber optic cable strung along power lines, but the fallen tree had the telltale gnaw marks of Canada's once-endangered largest rodent.
But beavers are not just an official symbol of the country's sovereignty — they are a known threat to its telecom infrastructure.
"It's unusual, but it does happen every once in a while," Gammer told CTV. "So I wouldn't be a rich man if I had a nickel for every beaver outage, but they do happen."
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