City's Internet Loss Due to Pecking Bird

Blame it on natural instinct.

A bird pecked a holed in the fiber bundle that provides Internet service to the City of Mountain View's government and created a 15-hour service disruption, according to information Comcast representatives gave city spokeswoman Kimberly Thomas.

The outage began Tuesday, Oct. 9 at approximately 5 p.m. and impacted the city's website, e-mail and the webcasting of the city council study and regular session.

"The City lost Internet connectivity for an extended period of time and City services were effected, but the publics’ safety was not," Thomas said. "The City’s IT Manager and IT staff responded immediately, performed troubleshooting, and contacted the service provider."

According to Thomas, the source of the problem—the hole caused by the bird—was found at approximately 4 a.m. and service was restored around 8 a.m.

"The City’s IT infrastructure failover systems worked as designed—preserving core services like phone connections," Thomas said. "Though a fiber disruption of this type is clearly rare, the City will look to further reinforce our systems to defend against Internet outages of any type."

Thomas is working on getting information on the type of bird that caused the outage to the city's website.

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