Raccoons, Squirrels as Uptime Busters

Pingdom has been digging up some unusual causes of power and connectivity outages, including incidents involving a raccoon, cable thieves and random gunfire. While the New Year's Eve raccoon incident may seem unusual to some, you'd be amazed at how many power outages are caused by small furry critters. In most cases, however, it is squirrels rather than raccoons that provide the largest headache for power companies.

If you enter "squirrel outage" in either Google News or Google web search, you'll find a lengthy record of both recent and historic incidents of squirrels causing local power outages. Those with long memories of bizarre utility outage stories may recall that this issue made the front page of the Wall Street Journal in 2003. The story is in the Journal archives, but there's a copy online at CritterGuard, one of the companies mentioned in the article. The business angle was a surge in anti-squirrel technology, which is a tricky business, as the story relates:

When it comes to telecom and fiber, the most pernicious threat is often the backhoe. Back in 2006 Kevin Poulsen at Wired did a comprehensive story on backhoe-driven outages, noting that construction equipment remains the "ultimate denial of service tool."