“It’s hard to make this stuff up,” Matt Springer, county administrator for Medina County, Ohio, said. He was commenting on the cause of a recent area Internet outage. On Feb. 20, Internet and phone connectivity went down for multiple county government offices, including the prosecutor’s office. Officials believed that contractors working nearby had accidentally hit some underground fiber lines.
The real culprit, however, turned out to be a squirrel. The animal had built a nest within the county’s fiber infrastructure and chewed through a few of the lines. The county is now working with area Internet providers to make sure such a thing doesn’t happen again.
