Free: the possibility of sabotage behind the general outage in the Gers
La Dépêche, October 12, 2022 (extract)
A major network failure has affected hundreds of homes in the Gers since Tuesday, October 11. Customers of the operator Free are victims of a service interruption following a potential act of vandalism on a fiber optic cable, located in the town of Blagnac (31). Neither calls nor access to Internet have been possible for more than 24 hours. From Auch to Vic-Fezensac through Lectoure or Monblanc, the area affected by the incident extends over almost the entire department and beyond. Some communes in Haute-Garonne and Tarn-et-Garonne are also affected by a network failure.
Technicians were mobilized from Tuesday afternoon to identify the origin of the failure. It was in the town of L’Isle-Jourdain, using an optical reflectometer (a device to determine the integrity of a fiber optic cable) that the source of the incident was detected … 35 km away, in the neighboring department. In the early afternoon of Wednesday, a Free technician was reviewing one of the fiber installations on one of the splitters in the town of Auch, [when] one of his colleagues told him the news: the operator’s equipment had been the target of an act of vandalism. The latter also specified that the incident was detected at the level of an access ramp to the A621 freeway in the commune of Blagnac.
On the night of Sunday, July 31 to Monday, August 1, 2022, between 9:00 pm and 3:00 am, the cable shaft of the signal box in Mering (Bavaria) was deliberately set on fire. Many regional trains between Munich and Augsburg were cancelled for 48 hours. The attack also severely disrupted long-distance ICE and Intercity trains from Nuremberg, Ulm and Stuttgart – all of which passed through this important rail hub – causing long delays and cancellations.
According to a Deutsche Bahn (DB) spokesperson, who had to justify the late return to normal operation, it is caused by burned cables along the tracks: “About 15 cables, each containing more than 500 wires, were affected and had to be replaced. These cables control, among other things, the signals along the line and important functions of the Mering signal box.”
Valley, particularly in Quillan and Esperaza, have been deprived of a telephone and Internet network. The operator Orange said that the failure is due to an act of vandalism committed on a fiber optic cable located in the town of Quillan.
On Wednesday, September 7, incendiary actions were carried out in emblematic high schools of the capital, at the same time that a student mobilization was taking place in the streets and subways of Santiago (RM).
