A 75-year-old Georgian woman shut down the Internet in neighboring Armenia for more than 12 hours last month when she sliced through a fiber optic cable while looking for scrap metal, according to Georgian officials.
Nearly all of Armenia was without Internet access on March 28 and customers of one of the largest Georgian Internet service providers, Caucasus Online, also lost access for nearly five hours, according to Bloomberg.
The woman was arrested by Georgian authorities and charged with property damage, the news agency reported Wednesday. She was "temporarily released due to her old age" on the day of the incident, Bloomberg quoted Georgian Interior Ministry spokesman Zurab Gvenetadze as saying.
She has confessed to damaging a cable belonging to Georgian Railway Telecom while looking for copper near the Georgian village of Ksani, according to Azerbaijan's News.az.
How the woman managed to find an Internet cable that provides 90 percent of Armenia's Internet access was a mystery, a Georgian Railway Telecom spokesman told Bloomberg.
"We don't how she found the optic cable, which was secure," he said. The spokesman speculated that mudslides may have exposed the cable to people hunting for copper and other scrap metal.
The incident affected tens of thousands of residents and businesses in the two countries, the Georgian ministry official said. Armenia's three main ISPs—ArmenTel, FiberNet Communication and GNC-Alfa—were all unable to provide service for hours, according to reports.
Caucasus Online launched its $76 million fiber-optic link to Western European ISPs in 2008. A monitoring station in Western Europe detected the damage on the day of the incident and immediately dispatched a security team to Georgia, where the woman was arrested, The Guardian reported Thursday.
Nearly all of Armenia was without Internet access on March 28 and customers of one of the largest Georgian Internet service providers, Caucasus Online, also lost access for nearly five hours, according to Bloomberg.
The woman was arrested by Georgian authorities and charged with property damage, the news agency reported Wednesday. She was "temporarily released due to her old age" on the day of the incident, Bloomberg quoted Georgian Interior Ministry spokesman Zurab Gvenetadze as saying.
She has confessed to damaging a cable belonging to Georgian Railway Telecom while looking for copper near the Georgian village of Ksani, according to Azerbaijan's News.az.
How the woman managed to find an Internet cable that provides 90 percent of Armenia's Internet access was a mystery, a Georgian Railway Telecom spokesman told Bloomberg.
"We don't how she found the optic cable, which was secure," he said. The spokesman speculated that mudslides may have exposed the cable to people hunting for copper and other scrap metal.
The incident affected tens of thousands of residents and businesses in the two countries, the Georgian ministry official said. Armenia's three main ISPs—ArmenTel, FiberNet Communication and GNC-Alfa—were all unable to provide service for hours, according to reports.
Caucasus Online launched its $76 million fiber-optic link to Western European ISPs in 2008. A monitoring station in Western Europe detected the damage on the day of the incident and immediately dispatched a security team to Georgia, where the woman was arrested, The Guardian reported Thursday.
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