75-Year-Old Woman with Shovel Accidentally Cuts Off Almost All Internet Service in Armenia

According to local authorities, a 75-year-old woman from Georgia (the Eurasian country, not the US state) accidentally cut off Internet service to the entire country of Armenia. With a shovel. Apparently, on March 28th, the woman was digging for copper to sell as scrap metal when she accidentally sliced through a fiber-optic cable that linked Georgia’s network with Armenia’s.

The Guardian reports that as Georgia provides 90% of Armenia’s Internet service, this caused “Web users in the nation of 3.2 million people [to be] left twiddling their thumbs for up to five hours as the country’s main internet providers – ArmenTel, FiberNet Communication and GNC-Alfa – were prevented from supplying their normal service.” (Bloomberg pegs the figure at over 12 hours.) The outage was detected by a network-monitoring service based in Western Europe, and the woman arrested shortly thereafter.

The woman in question was “temporarily released due to her old age,” but faces up to three years in prison for damaging property.

(via Guardian)