Beavers: unlikely suspect in town's internet outage

Telecommunications is often seen as a serious business, so we love running into stories that show the fun inner workings of a very complex industry!

Well, dam. A group of eager beavers shut down internet service in a western Canadian town over the weekend after they chewed through fiber cables and used them to build their home. 

The outage wreaked havoc on the internet, cable television and local cell phone service of about 1,000 Telus customers in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia — a town with only about 2,000 people total. The service provider described the 36-hour outage as a "very rare and uniquely Canadian disruption." 

"Our team immediately worked to identify the location of the damage and discovered that the cause of this fiber cut is fairly unique — beavers have chewed through our fiber cable at multiple points, causing extensive damage," Telus spokesperson Liz Sauvé told CBS News on Monday. "Our team located a nearby dam, and it appears the beavers dug underground alongside the creek to reach our cable, which is buried about three feet underground and protected by a 4.5-inch thick conduit."

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