Turns out that the cuts were deliberate, either well equipped vandals or deliberate sabotage. Depending on the news article, it's either four or eight fiber bundles severed at two different locations. Not accidents with a back hoe but someone opened the manholes and went down into the underground utility vaults.

Besides no landline, no cell, no 911, no Internet, no ATM or real-time credit card authorizations, there were a couple other glitches that I hadn't expected to read about.

One was that the police suggested that the banks close. Without phones or access to 911, they were worried that some people might be tempted to rob a bank during this outage.

One gas station said that they couldn't pump gas because they couldn't process credit cards at all. So, being able to take manual imprints didn't seem to be an option in this case. Perhaps some chains require centralized payment processing to turn on the gas pumps? I don't know, but the fact that this gas station couldn't take any CC was surprising to read.

The other thing that I wasn't expecting was the inability of some doctors to access electronic health records for their patients. I'm assuming that this hospital uses some centralized database somewhere offsite. So even though this might the usual place where a patient comes in, their records just aren't stored there.

The 911 folks in one area had their calls diverted outside the region to another call center. I assume that there's already some mutual aid protocol set up for this. But that outside call center takes the call, then somehow units back in the affected area get dispatched. Fortunately, sounded like a quiet day for emergency services.