You'd think that, after all of these years and the supposed technological bias of Wikipedia contributors, we'd have an encyclopaedia around here somewhere that explained backhoe fade a.k.a. backhoe fading, including such things as warning label conventions that are supposed to mitigate it and explaining that despite the name it is taken quite seriously given that it's responsible for a significant fraction (a 1993 study said three-fifths) of physical layer outages in cable networks, wouldn't you? ☺ Uncle G ( talk) 17:39, 7 August 2012 (UTC)
Clarification on the major outage: Apparently we were supposed to be allocated bandwidth on two different fiber-optic cables from the Tampa data center. The data center, however, erroneously put our 2 bandwidth allotments on the same cable, so when the cable was cut, we had no redundant connection between Tampa and Virginia to fall back to. Kaldari ( talk) 22:32, 8 August 2012 (UTC)