Copper Theft Is Cutting Fiber Lines Across Southern California. Here's How to Keep Your Business Online

The Cable They Cut Didn't Even Have Copper In It

On the morning of August 7, 2026, someone cut through a Spectrum fiber line in Baldwin Hills. The damage severed more than 1,400 individual fibers and knocked out service in Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, Fairfax, Koreatown, and other parts of Los Angeles. Two days later, vandalism to Verizon's fiber lines caused outages across parts of Southern California.

The detail that stands out is that neither line had any copper in it. Investigators believe the people responsible thought they were stealing copper wire. By the time they found out they had cut fiber, which is worthless to a scrap dealer, thousands of businesses and residents were already offline.

This is the new reality for businesses across Southern California. Copper theft and vandalism have become one of the most common reasons business internet goes down, and it doesn't matter whether your own connection uses copper at all. Fiber shares the same poles, vaults, and conduit as the copper thieves are looking for, and it gets cut right along with it.

By the Numbers: Infrastructure Attacks Are Surging

Nationwide

• The U.S. telecommunications industry suffered 15,540 attacks on its infrastructure between June 2024 and June 2025, affecting more than 9.5 million customers, according to the Communications Cable and Connectivity Association.
• Attacks on communications infrastructure rose 59% over the past year, according to The Internet & Television Association (NCTA).

In Los Angeles

• Los Angeles now leads the nation in cable and wire theft, with more than double the incidents of Houston, the second-highest city.
• Copper-theft incidents across the City of Los Angeles grew from 9 in 2006 to 4,534 in 2021, and to nearly 16,000 in fiscal year 2024–25.
• Since 2020, the City of Los Angeles has spent more than $100 million repairing damage tied to copper and metal theft, according to Los Angeles County Supervisor Kathryn Barger.
• Roughly 1 in 10 of the city's 225,000 streetlights is out of service, with a repair backlog of more than 32,000 requests, many of them tied to wire theft.

The driving force is simple: copper prices have more than tripled over the past decade, which makes any cable on a pole or in a vault look like a paycheck.

Why Thieves Keep Cutting Fiber

From the street, a bundle of fiber and a bundle of copper look much the same. Thieves working quickly at night, often in a manhole or on a pole, cut first and find out what they have later. Fiber also runs right alongside copper on the same poles and through the same underground vaults, so a crew going after copper can take out fiber in the same cut.

Add vandalism to the mix, meaning damage with no theft motive at all, and it's clear these incidents aren't rare accidents. They're organized, repeated, and increasingly common across the region. Some carriers have gone as far as sealing access points with concrete after the same sites were broken into again and again.

Why These Outages Take So Long to Fix

A fiber cut isn't a reboot-the-router problem. A crew has to locate the damage, secure the site, and then splice every damaged strand back together one at a time. The Baldwin Hills cut involved more than 1,400 fibers. A clean cut on an accessible line might be restored the same day. Damage in an underground vault, a long stretch of stolen cable, or a location that thieves keep coming back to can take much longer.

And because a single cable often carries service for thousands of customers, your business is one ticket in a very long queue.

The Real Problem: One Circuit, One Path

Most businesses that go down during a fiber cut don't have a bandwidth problem or an equipment problem. They have a single-path problem: one circuit, coming in over one physical route, into one entry point in the building. When that path is cut, there's nowhere else for traffic to go.

The fix is redundancy, but the details matter. A second connection only helps if it doesn't fail at the same time as the first, and if your network can actually use it without someone reconfiguring things in the middle of an outage.

That's where a diverse backup circuit combined with SD-WAN comes in.

What SD-WAN Actually Does

SD-WAN (software-defined wide area networking) sits at the edge of your network and manages multiple internet connections as one intelligent pool. Instead of treating your backup line as a spare that sits idle until disaster strikes, SD-WAN continuously monitors every circuit for packet loss, latency, and jitter, and steers traffic over whichever path is healthiest at that moment.

Fast, automatic failover. When your primary circuit is cut, SD-WAN detects it and shifts traffic to the backup automatically, typically within seconds. No one has to notice, call anyone, or touch any equipment.

It catches "brownouts," not just blackouts. A damaged line can drop packets or spike latency before it fails completely. Basic failover only reacts when a link is fully down. SD-WAN sees degraded performance and moves sensitive traffic before your users feel it.

Application-aware routing. Voice calls, video meetings, and payment processing get the best available path, while bulk traffic like backups and software updates uses whatever is left.

Both circuits earn their keep. SD-WAN can run both connections at once (active-active), so your backup circuit adds usable capacity every day instead of sitting idle.

Visibility. You get a clear view of how each circuit is performing, so recurring problems show up as data instead of vague complaints that "the internet is slow again."

Your Public IP Stays the Same, No Matter Which Circuit Is Carrying Traffic

This is where many failover setups fall apart, and where Tierzero's SD-WAN is different.

With a traditional backup connection, each internet provider gives you its own public IP address. When your primary fails and traffic moves to the backup, your public IP changes, and everything built around the old address breaks with it:

• Site-to-site VPNs stop connecting, because the far end is expecting your old IP as its peer.
• NAT statements and port forwards for cameras, servers, and phone systems no longer line up.
• IP allowlists at banks, payment processors, SaaS vendors, and partners start rejecting your traffic.
• DNS records for anything you host point to an address that isn't there anymore.

The result is that your "failover" technically works, but half your business still can't function until someone rebuilds the configuration, often in the middle of the outage.

Tierzero's SD-WAN keeps your public IP the same no matter who your underlying provider is. Whether your traffic is running over fiber, cable, fixed wireless, or 5G, the world sees the same address. You configure your NAT statements, VPN tunnels, and allowlists once, and they keep working through every failover. There's no second set of rules to maintain and nothing to update when a circuit goes down.

It also means you're free to choose the best backup circuit for your building, from whichever carrier offers the most diverse path, without worrying about re-addressing your network.

A Practical Checklist for Fiber-Cut Resilience

1. A Backup Circuit on a Genuinely Different Path

This is the step most businesses get wrong. Two connections from two different providers can still run on the same poles, through the same vaults, and into the same building entrance. One cut takes out both.

Real diversity means a different physical path, and ideally a different type of infrastructure. A common, resilient pairing is dedicated fiber as the primary with a wireless backup, either fixed wireless or 5G. Both reach your building over the air instead of through the cables running down your street, which is exactly the infrastructure thieves are targeting.

2. SD-WAN Managing Both Circuits

A backup circuit without intelligent management is only half the solution. SD-WAN turns two connections into one resilient network, with automatic failover, performance-based steering, and priority for the applications your business can't run without.

3. A Public IP That Doesn't Change During Failover

If your VPNs, NAT rules, and vendor allowlists are tied to your primary provider's IP address, failover will break them. Make sure your SD-WAN keeps the same public IP across every circuit, so your configuration survives the switch.

4. Automatic Failover You've Actually Tested

"We have failover" and "our failover works" are two different statements. Schedule a real test: disconnect the primary circuit during a quiet period and confirm that calls stay up, VPNs stay connected, cloud apps stay reachable, and payment systems keep processing. Failover Internet is built around exactly this: automatic failover that's configured, monitored, and verified, rather than assumed.

5. Voice Traffic That Can Survive a Switch

Phones are usually the first thing people notice during an outage. A cloud-hosted phone system paired with SD-WAN keeps calls flowing over whichever circuit is healthy. Even if every circuit at the office goes down, a hosted system can reroute calls to mobile devices or remote staff.

6. Power Backup and Security That Follow Your Traffic

Put your SD-WAN appliance, firewall, core switch, and wireless backup modem on a UPS so a brief power flicker doesn't turn into a full outage. And make sure your managed firewall applies the same protections no matter which circuit is carrying your traffic.

Why This Matters Even More for Multi-Location Businesses

For businesses with several offices, stores, or clinics across Southern California, fiber cuts are a numbers game: the more sites you have, the more likely one of them is dealing with a cut on any given day. SD-WAN gives every location the same automatic failover and lets you manage them all from one place. Because public IPs stay consistent, the site-to-site VPNs connecting your locations stay up too. A cut at one site becomes a non-event instead of an emergency. Many businesses take this a step further with Network as a Service, where the circuits, SD-WAN, and monitoring are all delivered and managed together.

What It Costs to Do Nothing

It's easy to think of a backup circuit as an extra monthly expense. The more useful comparison is the cost of a day offline: missed calls, stalled sales, idle staff, frustrated customers, and orders that go to a competitor. For most businesses, one long outage costs more than years of backup service. (We broke this down in more detail in The Real Cost of an Internet Outage.)

Don't Wait for the Next Cut

You can't stop thieves from pulling cable out of a vault down the street. What you can do is make sure the next cut in your neighborhood is something your business barely notices.

Tierzero has been keeping Southern California businesses connected since 1997, with 24/7 U.S.-based support and our own data center in Downtown Los Angeles. If you want an honest look at where your network has a single point of failure, and what a diverse backup circuit with SD-WAN would look like for your locations, talk to us before the next cut, not during it.

Sources

• Beverly Press: Fiber lines cut, disrupting service in Beverly Hills, WeHo, Fairfax (Aug. 13, 2026)
• ABC7 Los Angeles: Los Angeles leads the nation in wire, cable thefts (Aug. 18, 2026)
• City Journal: Los Angeles Darkening (Aug. 23, 2026)
• WCCTV: Copper Theft in California: Why It's Rising and Who It Impacts Most (July 15, 2026)