AT&T offers $10K reward for vandals that damaged Ukiah, Calif. fiber network

AT&T (NYSE: T) has once again found its network being compromised by vandals and its offering up to $10,000 for information that leads to the arrest and conviction of those people responsible for attempted copper theft in Ukiah, Calif. that caused damage to a fiber line.

This recent network breach, which brought down service for tens of thousands of people, is now being investigated by the Mendocino County Sheriff's Office.

Sheriff Tom Allman has asked anyone if they had been in contact with someone trying to sell copper wire last Thursday to a scrap dealer.

Due to the vandalism incident, seven 911 call centers went down as a result of the outage. Service was later restored to all North Coast 911 call centers.

California State Sen. Mike McGuire, told The Northcoast Journal that "there is an active investigation taking place," adding that "AT&T is cooperating with law enforcement in Mendocino County."

This is just one of several vandalism incidents AT&T has reported on its network.

In July, AT&T restored service on its network in Northern California after vandals cut through one of its fiber lines, shutting down service for 22 hours. That is just one of 10 incidents that has taken place on its network over the past year. The network outage, which left thousands of users in the Central Valley, Tuolumne and Calaveras counties without service, is now under FBI investigation.

AT&T is not the only service provider to suffer vandalism on its network. A similar network outage in July occurred on Level 3 and Zayo's backbone networks in the San Francisco Bay area after vandals cut fiber lines.

For more:
- North Coast Journal has this article

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