Seems there is a downvoter who is averse to facts and reality, i.e. a conspiracy theorist.
There are a lot of those about. It's much easier for people to stab their thumbs at the screen than it is to try to argue their point. Especially a lot of previous 'conspiracy theories' are turning out to be correct theories, 'fake news' is real news.
Then people wonder why there's growing distrust in both media and politics. Suggesting the 'vid came from a lab in China used to get you banned from 'reliable sources', now the US DoE (of all places) is floating the idea that it was correct.
But there's some ability to think about the probabilities. Or think like an actuary, because one of the things they do is to pore over data and look for outliers to do stuff like fraud detection and prevention. It's actually a well established science.
Back in the good'ol days, the UK pretty much had 1 cable operator. Good'ol Cable & Wireless. It had the monopoly and went around the world laying cables, bringing pretty much all of them back to a sleepy lil village in Cornwalll called Porthcurno, where there's an excellent museum that's well worth visiting. Most countries worked the same way, with a single operator being responsible for international or domestic infrastructure, or both. Because running damp string under oceans was/is stonkingly expensive, nations even co-operated on cable construction and formed consortia to design/build and operate those systems, eg (in)famous cables like Se-Me-We etc. It was a relatively small club, with common interests delivering telegrams and voice calls to a small number of landing stations like Porthcurno. The approach routes were easily marked on Admiralty charts, and Cornish fishermen knew not to drag trawl or drag anchors in those marked areas.
Then came telecomms de-regulation, the Internet, offshore power, offshore cross-bunkering of PoL and a massive increase in both shipping, the number of cables, pipes, landing stations.. And unsuprisingly, outages. To an extent, they're predictable and designs can mitigate against the risks. So plan a route that goes deep as fast as possible, avoids busy shipping/fishing areas and add additional protection like burial or matting where risks are higher. Some of those can be harder to avoid, like risks of tsunamis or quakes damaging cables though.
But it means we end up with congested areas where there's a lot of activity, a lot of cables and the probability of an outage is greatly increased. A fairly classic example is around the Suez canal where multiple cables converge in a small area to run along the sides of the canal. Any time the canal is blocked, or major ports go on strike, shipping traffic builds up around the canal zone, they drop anchor and cables get cut. There are some international cables that land in East Anglia. The government, in it's infinite wisdom decided to allow oil tankers to cross-ship cargo just offshore of the landing station there. Unsuprisingly, cables get cut.
So then it's figuring out if damage is unexpected, and possibly intentional, or accidental or negligent. This is also where politics comes in to play again, with potentially dire consequences. We don't seem to care who blew up NordStream, or at least care to tell the electorate who's responsible for our record inflation. Deliberate sabotage, or even 'accidents' gets press attention though. Increased press atttention may make assorted nutjobs start thinking 'Hey, we could do this and get on TV!'. I'm curious if we're seeing this effect now. There does seem to be an unusual increase in fires, vandalism, derailments etc against facilities like food and energy production across the US and Europe. Those may be coincidental, those may be enemy action, or they may be the assorted nutjobs realising a lot of this stuff is actually pretty vulnerable. I'm pretty sure TPTB are keeping a close eye on these incidents though.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
