FBI Investigating Vandalism of Fiber Optic Cables

On Tuesday someone sliced at least three fiber optic cables in an underground vault in Alameda County. The cuts disrupted Internet and phone service around Sacramento and parts of the Bay Area for 20 hours before service was restored.

FBI spokesman Greg Wuthrich said it appears to be the latest in about a dozen acts of vandalism at Bay Area locations in the last year.

"The severed cables are actually happening in multiple cities, in multiple jurisdictions," Wuthrich said.

Fiber cables in Fremont, Walnut Creek and San Jose have been intentionally severed in 11 instances since July 2014. The FBI became involved last month because cable cuts in one location can affect businesses and customers in other jurisdictions.

FBI officials are disputing a statement issued by Wave Broadband that described the vandalism as a "coordinated attack" on its website early this morning.

The cables that were vandalized are owned by Level 3 Communications and Zayo Group. Wave Broadband is their customer, and provides Internet, telephone and television links through the cables.

Level 3 Communications and Zayo Group could not offer estimates of how many people were affected. Wave Broadband spokesman Mark Peterson said customers in parts of suburban Sacramento lost some service.

"It was not a comprehensive outage," Peterson said. "It was an outage where phone service was affected, Internet service was slowed and there was some interruption of complete cable service."

Wuthrich declined to say how many companies and customers were affected by the cuts this week.

In April 2009, tens of thousands of people in Santa Clara, Santa Cruz and San Benito counties lost landline, cellphone and Internet service after vandals cut fiber optic cables at four sites.