On Fri, 5 May 2000, Roland Dobbins wrote:

FYI, there are reports of a major cw.net fiber cut in Australia, with multiple ISPs affected. Side-effects are said to include major degradation of the PSTN, Sydney stock-exchange slowdowns, and cash-machine issues.

No precise details or ETR known at this time, nor data concerning North American/trans-Pacific second-order effects, if any.

Apparently it's fixed: http://www.cwo.com.au/newsroom/1,1450,173,00.html Temporary Network Outage 05th May, 2000 Some Cable & Wireless Optus? services were accidentally severed today and were restored in two hours. The company?s national fibre optic backbone has two independent fibre links. Early today the company experienced a fibre cut on one link, near Nowa Nowa in Gippsland, Victoria caused by a landslip. On-site repairs began immediately. In a completely unrelated incident, a second fibre cut to the remaining link occurred, just after 10.00am, near Wangaratta. This cut was caused by contractors working on another company?s network. Any temporary loss of service experienced after 10.00am was a result of cuts to both links. By noon repair work on the Nowa Nowa cut was largely completed and services are being progressively restored. We expect full service restoration by early afternoon. ?The odds of an incident like this happening are extremely small. We moved immediately to restore services and apologise to customers who experienced temporary loss of service during this two hour period,? said Bill Hope, Cable & Wireless Optus Chief Technical Officer. For more information: Optus Media Centre Phone: 02 9342 7850