Forget about the iPhone ruining an operator’s billion dollar network thanks to hipsters overusing Instagram to share with the world what type of beer they’re drinking with their sushi lunches, this past Sunday all it took were a couple of crooked thieves breaking into one of Vodafone’s UK data facilities to knock out service to several hundred thousand users. According to a post in Vodafone’s official forums the break in occurred in Basingstoke, South England between 01:00 and 02:00 and “some specialist network equipment and IT hardware was stolen.” It took nearly a day to fix the issue and Vodafone now reports that for the most part voice, SMS, and mobile data has been restored to the people who have been impacted.
Something like this should never, ever, happen. These sort of facilities are usually guarded and under heavy surveillance. Why then would anyone try to break in? Anyone working in the IT industry knows how expensive the type of equipment that go into these buildings can cost. As someone who used to work in IT, and has friends who work in IT, a high grade Cisco router fetching $500,000 or more is not unheard of. Still, this is rather sloppy on Vodafone’s part and you’d be hard pressed to hear about a similar thing happening in America or other rich Western European nation. Operators in Africa have to deal with this sort of stuff all the time. Even worse they have to power their cell towers with generators that run off of the same gasoline that powers your car.
Let this serve as a reminder for how fragile our infrastructure really is, and that if you really need to reach people you may need to invest in a land line or SIM cards for every wireless operator in your country.
[Via: Business Week, The Telegraph]