All animals seek shelter in one form or another, and since humans build the biggest and most durable structures, creatures such as rats tend to amass in human infrastructure. And since they don’t have any concept of personal or public property, rats also tend to chew on anything and everything, be it drugs or fiber optic cables. In early 2026, G.Network — an internet service provider in London, England — filed for the U.K. equivalent of bankruptcy because a bunch of rats chewed through its internet cables.
Originally (as reported by The Telegraph), the rival internet provider Community Fibre was in talks to acquire G.Network, but the company withdrew its bid due to the sheer amount of damage the rats caused. This was only the latest internet-based catastrophe caused by a mischief of rats (yes, that’s what a group of rats is called). In 2023, the entire Tring area (a borough in Hertfordshire, England) lost all of its internet because nesting rats had chewed through several cables.
According to engineers working at Openreach (via BBC) — the communications company servicing the area — this was no easy feat because the outer casing was so tough you’d normally need a drill to pierce it. And last month, the internet in the city of Doncaster, England, went down because, you guessed it, rodents damaged the cables. Makes you wonder, since scientists can teach rats how to drive miniature cars, could they train rats to chew through internet cables of foreign adversaries to disable their communications?
Rats throw a monkey wrench into green fiber optic cable plans
Rats gnaw on just about anything they get their paws on due to an uncontrollable instinct. In the wild, rats use their incisors to scavenge for food, create nesting materials, and help with climbing. Since rats can’t tell the difference between a forest and a basement, why should they act differently when they encounter a cable? Especially if it smells like food.
Rats could pose a significant threat to biodegradable internet cable jackets — like the ones G.Network used — because they are often constructed out of soy or corn-based materials. It’s no secret that rats have a keen sense of smell and use it to do everything from hunt for food to identify other rats — scientists even used this knowledge and created a robot that smelled like rats to fool other rats. While biodegradable fiber optic cables aren’t commonplace, rats could potentially sniff them out and, unable to differentiate between corn-based sheaths and actual corn, devour the cables and damage them, causing more internet blackouts.
When Openreach commented on rats chewing through the fiber optic cables, a representative said the event was “rare,” but according to the chief executive of Community Fibre, Graem Oxby, rats still seek out cables because they are “very tasty.” If companies adopt biodegradable cable sheaths, rats chewing through cables could become a frequent and costly occurrence.
Rats aren’t the only animals that chew through cables
Rats pose a particular threat to fiber optic cables because of their numbers and prodigiously sharp and efficient incisors. But rats aren’t the only rodents on the planet, and semi-related species also tend to damage other cables. Gophers are a difficult pest throughout parts of the U.S., rapidly devouring crops on farms. But they have been known to chew through electrical wiring, irrigation lines, water pipes, and buried fiber optic cables as well.
To make matters worse, gophers are significantly more robust than smaller rodents, and repellents that deter mice don’t have any effect on gophers. Squirrels are another adversary of cable-based infrastructure. While nowhere near as numerous as rats, squirrel incisors are on par with them, and they’re superior climbers, which lets them reach cables rats cannot. In 2011, Time Warner Cable had to replace 87 miles of cable in New York due to squirrel-based damage.
However, squirrels pose a much bigger threat to power grids and have been known to burrow into substations and chew through wire insulation. Arguably, the most damaging squirrel attack took place in 1987, when a squirrel accidentally cut power to NASDAQ. Traders couldn’t work for over an hour and a half, and even after the computers regained power, a freak power surge damaged NASDAQ’s mainframe and rendered the backup generators inoperable. Cyber terrorists wish they could damage electrical infrastructures as much as squirrels.
