A beaver brought the Internet down for 900 customers in British Columbia, Canada.
On Saturday, the large rodent chewed through a Telus fiber cable near a creek and used some of the materials for its dam. Services were resumed the next day.
In a "very bizarre and uniquely Canadian turn of events," Telus spokesperson Liz Sauvé explained that the company "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.
"The beavers first chewed through the conduit before chewing through the cable in multiple locations."
The engineers had to fix the cable, buried under frozen ground. Services were fixed after 36 hours.
Hundreds of power cuts are attributable to squirrels, snakes, and other critters that accidentally short circuit equipment - but the result is usually worse for them than it is for the grid.
Google once discovered that it was suffering from frequent short outages on a multi-terabit fiber path through Oregon, and traced it back to cows that liked to step on the cable. The company also had to reinforce thousands of miles of submarine cables after discovering that sharks liked to attack them.
As for data centers themselves, cats once filled a data center with hair and poop. Another time, a deer broke into one as it was being decommissioned.