We like to imagine the internet as this mystical, cloud-based magic that hovers around us, unseen but omnipresent. But on Wednesday, millions of Reliance Jio customers in Delhi, Punjab, and Haryana discovered the hard way that the internet is also very, very physical. It is a creature that resides at the bottom of thin glass tubes, hidden just inches below the dirt. And when those tubes are severed, the magic ceases immediately. A massive outage has spread across North India, grinding work-from-home setups and streaming binges to a halt.
The Glass Road Under the Concrete Road
So here’s the reality with fiber optics. Data moves through the conduits as pulses of light over threads of glass thinner than a human hair. It’s very, very fast, but it is also very vulnerable. For today’s chaos, the villain isn’t a hacker in a hoodie or a satellite gone bad; it’s probably a backhoe loader. Jio has confirmed that road construction led to “multiple fiber cuts.”
If you think about the internet infrastructure, it’s like a very complicated plumbing system running under the city. If a construction team digging a trench for a new highway accidentally hits the main water pipe, people in that whole neighborhood are going to be without water. That’s precisely what occurred in this case, except that rather than water, it is gigabytes upon gigabytes of data seeping into the ground. In telecom-speak, this is known as a “fiber cut,” and it’s the bane of every ISP (Internet Service Provider).
The Restoration Nightmare
It’s not like correcting a cut fiber is just two wires twisted back together with some electrical tape. This is precision surgery. Technicians have to physically figure out where the break is — which could be many miles away from where you are sitting, in an underground cable, say — dig there, then use a machine called a “fusion splicer” to melt the glass strands back together at a microscopic level. If the centering of two devices is off by even a small fraction of a millimeter, light will not pass through, and your Netflix video won’t finish buffering.
Right now, in the thick of a hot summer, Jio’s field teams are in the heat, dust, and traffic, putting these arteries back together. The redundancy systems—alternate routes that usually take over when one line goes down — likely became overloaded, were cut in what’s known as a “dual cut scenario,” or were just bad luck made worse by poor planning.
The Human Cost of Downtime
In a world that’s moved to a digital-first economy, an outage like this is more than inconvenient; it can be an economic breakage. Stock orders failed to go through for traders in Delhi. Pupils in Punjab were disconnected during online preparation. The reliance on a single provider was a source of frustration today. It underscores a major weakness of our urban infrastructure: we’re ripping up our cities to build better roads, but in doing so, we repeatedly decapitate our digital nervous system.
When Will the Lights Come Back On?
Restoration is underway, but “underway” is a vague term. It could take hours. For the time being, users are toying with tethering to their mobile hotspots, which, ironically, are also slow because everyone else had the same idea and clogged the cell towers.
So if your router is flashing that angry red light, don’t reboot it for the 10th time. It’s not the router. It’s a fragment of glass under an overpass somewhere that will reel in a surgeon wearing a high-vis vest to fix it.
