Verizon's mad as hell, and it just doesn't know who to take it out on. Yet.

The US's largest mobile telco has reportedly filed a lawsuit against vandals who plunged large chunks of Silicon Valley into communications darkness by sabotaging a fiber-optic cable.

Verizon's filed a John Doe and Does case with a court in California, and said it will amend the complaint once the wrongdoers have been identified.

The attack on a section of AT&T fiber saw 100,000 Verizon Wireless customers cut off from each other and the outside world for 20 hours last week. The initial attack took place on Thursday afternoon and was followed up by a further assault on fiber owned by Sprint Nextel.

The action saw cellphones, landlines, emergency service calls, call-center operations, credit card and ATM transactions across southern Silicon Valley blacked out for hours.

AT&T has offered a $100,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of the perpetrators.

Normally, a network outage can be attributed to Steve the builder inadvertently putting his JCB digger or Kango drill through some cable. In this case, though, there was clear intent.

Authorities reported the vandals had to lift up some heavy manhole covers using a special tool, climb down a shaft and then chop through heavy cables. The four AT&T cables were encased in tough plastic sheath, with one cable containing 360 fibers and the other three holding 48 fibers each. ®

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