On July 1, Charter issued a press release that labeled damage to its fiber lines in Van Nuys, California, as domestic terrorism. The company said that thirteen fibers, that included 2,600 individual fibers, were cut. The cuts knocked out critical infrastructure such as emergency services, a U.S. military base, 911 centers, fire and police departments, financial institutions, court buildings, healthcare facilities and hospitals, educational institutions, and cell towers. The cuts affected more than 50,000 residential customers and more than 500 business customers for up to 30 hours.

On July 15, the company issued a second press release talking about a series of fiber cuts in Missouri. Charter, where it experienced 148 outages in the first half of the year, doubling the number of fiber cuts from the previous year.

This is the first time I remember an ISP labeling fiber cuts as domestic terrorism. But there have been clear cases of damage to communications systems that can be chalked up to terrorism. One incident that came to mind was a bomb detonated on Christmas Day in 2020 outside of an AT&T switching center. Electric companies have seen deliberate attacks on infrastructure, such as two substations attacked in Moore County, NC in 2022.

Charter’s announcement raises an interesting question about how to distinguish terrorism from normal damage to telecom infrastructure. There are a lot of incidents of damage to networks. ISPs reported over 5,700 incidents of infrastructure damage in the second half of 2024. A joint report issued by NCTA, CTIA, USTelecom, NTCA, and WIA detailed these incidents. That report says that 1,915 of the 5,700 incidents were cable cuts. A lot of these cuts were accidental or can be chalked up to those who dig without properly locating existing buried facilities. However, the report categorizes eighteen incidents as deliberate sabotage, and there may have been other incidents that should have been categorized the same way.

Charter admits that it’s using the domestic terrorism language to try to get the attention of legislators and law enforcement. There are 28 states today that have created a specific felony for deliberately damaging telecom infrastructure, and Charter would like to see that in more states. The company would also like to see law enforcement prosecute more cases. Charter would also like to see federal legislation address the issue.

Charter got the attention it was seeking. I’ve now seen articles throughout the industry asking if deliberate fiber cuts are domestic terrorism. The FBI opined that the cuts in Van Nuys were more than vandalism, and any industry person can understand that somebody didn’t accidentally cut thirteen different fibers.

After thinking about it, my definition of terrorism is when somebody destroys telecom infrastructure with the specific goal of knocking a lot of people out of service, particularly if the damage is done in a way that takes time to fix. A lot of damage to infrastructure is malicious, but is done for other purposes. For example, a lot of the incidents detailed in the report mentioned earlier were copper thefts. That is clearly criminal activity, but it’s difficult to classify as terrorism. Is it terrorism when somebody shoots at cables hanging on wires? Probably not, and this is just malicious vandalism.