backhoe fade
jargonnetworkingops culture
Telecom's dry name for total signal loss caused by construction equipment digging through the fiber.
Radio engineers speak of rain fade; fiber operators, with gallows humor, of backhoe fade: the abrupt, physical severing of a buried cable by an excavator that never called before digging. It is a leading cause of major outages, which is why serious designs demand physically diverse paths, in separate trenches, ideally on separate sides of the road. The term encodes a career's worth of wisdom: your redundancy is only as real as the geography between the two cables.