Severed fibre cables disrupted internet access in eastern Europe, Iran, Turkey
In the mid 2000s I was in the Middle East and used the internet to connect back to the United States for conducting business.  One day almost every site became unreachable (anything hosted in the states).  It turned out that a naval vessel had dropped anchor and Murphy's Law put the anchor right on top of some undersea fiber cables.  It was called a freak accident because statistically was so unlikely to happen.<p>It took a while to figure out what happened, and internet was out for a couple of days.  Considering service was restored in 30 minutes in this case, we are getting a lot better at handling severed cables.