recent outages were physical attacks on fibre
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2015/06/30/california-internet-outage/29521335/Am currently looking for an explanation of polar breeze, may be a daft question of course "for tapping wirelessly into nearby computers" is all I have found so far.
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The pub was getting fibre optic installed from BT and the tech said it would be a few weeks until it started working as the cables in our area had been cut.