On Sun, 6 Mar 2022, Laura Smith via NANOG wrote:
You do realise there's a shedload of fibre running around Europe ? There are so many redundant paths that you'd have to chop through quite a lot of it before anyone noticed much difference.
Historically, the largest telecommunication outages have been due to operator error & software bugs (or the malicious equivalent). Problems in large networks have more impact. Vulnerability to physical damage varies a lot between countries. Some countries have a lot of redundancy, other countries have limited redundancy. The big question for decision makers are trends. Are these 'normal' outage trends or 'unusual' outage trends. One farmer on a tractor digging up fiber may be normal. Two farmers is a concidence. More than two farmers is abnormal. <Insert my usual the importance of information sharing speech here>