Posted: Wed, Feb 28, 2001, 7:25 PM ET (0025 GMT)
A cut fiber optic cable has cut off the servers used by the SETI@home project from the rest of the Internet, keeping more than two million users from uploading their results and downloading new data. The University of California Berkeley reported Wednesday that vandals looking for copper in buried cables cut a nearby fiber optic cable early Tuesday that links the main campus with the Space Sciences Lab, where the SETI@home project hosts its computer systems. The broken cable means that the SETI@home web site is inaccessible and the projects users — over two million at last count — cannot upload the results of the data sets they have been processing on their own computers nor download new data sets. Berkeley officials said new cable is being laid and the network connection with the lab should be reestablished by Friday.

Related Links:

•  UC Berkeley announcement about SETI@home outage