Back in 2011 in the small Georgian village of Armazi, there lived a 75 year old woman named Hayastan Shakarian.
There's not much info on Armazi, but what's important about the village is that it has a railway station. The reason this is relevant is because the Georgian Railways company installed a fiber optic alongside its railroad tracks.
The state owned Georgian Railways came up with the idea of connecting the city of Poti on the Black Sea to the capital Tbilisi and also the other countries in the region to the Caucasus Cable System.
The Caucasus Cable Sytem is basically a huge underwater telecommunications cable that can transmit as much as 12.6 terabytes per second! It connects the Georgian city of Poti through the Black Sea to the Bulgarian city of Balchik, and this connects all the countries in the Caucasus region to mainland Europe without having to rely on less friendly countries like Russia.
But once you have connected Poti to Europe, you still need a land based cable to connect all the cities in the region to transmit the data.
Getting fiber optic cables installed is usually a long and difficult process, as you need to get permission to bury the cable across all sorts of different pieces of land. But if you're a railway company that owns land all over the country, things get a lot easier.
Georgian Railways set up another company called Georgian Railway Telecom, which was given ownership of a 40 centimer strip of land right next to all the railway tracks all across the country.
In this tiny piece of land it installed a fiber optic cable to bring the fast internet from the Caucasus Cable System to the rest of the country and even to neighboring countries like Armenia.
This is how the tiny insignificant village of Armazi, which has the Poti to Tbilisi railway running through it, also got a fiber optic cable going through it.
Hayastan Shakarian the 75 year old woman living in Armazi was like most residents in the area quite poor. So she worked to get a little extra cash by scavenging and selling copper.
On March 28th, Hayastan went out searching for copper. She started looking around the forest for anything she could scavenge, and then somehow found her way into the area with the train tracks.
She probably found something promising, and as she started digging, she eventually came across the fiber optic cable.
She might have thought this cable included copper, and decided to take it with her. Somehow she was able to cut the cable, but at that exact moment almost the entire nation of Armenia was suddenly without internet.
That's because the cable apparently provided 90% of Armenia's internet! For the next 12 hours the entire country of 3 million people with a few exceptions was completely without internet.
TV stations couldn't get news anymore, companies couldn't receive emails anymore, and hospitals couldn't download patient files.
Georgia's internet meanwhile was just slowed down a bit, as they had other cables going through the country. But in Armenia people panicked, because nobody knew what was going on!
Eventually the Georgian Railways Telecom company isolated the issue to Armazi, fixed the cable, and in the end Hayastan Shakarian was arrested.
So just be careful the next time you find something interesting, you never know what might happen!
Thanks for reading and I hope. You enjoyed this story!