Per Wikipedia:

Lodbrog is a 10,243 GT cable laying ship that was built as a freight ferry. She was built in 1983 as Siegelberg and completed in 1985 for Romanian owners as Tuzla. In 1996 she was renamed Bolero. The ship was renamed Lodbrog after conversion to a cable layer in 2001.

The fuck does this have to do with anything? Well…I was chatting a bit with some folks earlier this week and it triggered a memory of a DS3 from Way Back When. At the time I was relatively new to LinkedIn. I’d only been to a handful of these daily standups, and this particular one was fairly formative with respect to my understanding of the scope & scale at which LinkedIn operates. Specifically, one of the topics of discussion was GCN-19289. Unfortunately, the only inGraph remaining is relatively lame:

If I had more inGraphs from that timeframe I’d gladly provide them, but it was quite a while back and there really isn’t much data left to point to. This graph - included in the GCN ticket - shows impact to metrics due to high latencies/dropped traffic in China. The interesting bit is the why of the thing. The tl;dr: a submarine cable somewhere in the Pacific was cut and it had direct impact on our ability to serve traffic in Asia, which impacted growth metrics for China (which was - and still is - a large growth market). This was obviously completely outside of our control; we basically had to wait until Some Dudes with Some Gear got on A Boat and went out to Sort It. The thing that really struck me - I mean, what really made this ticket sink home: the name of the fucking boat is in the ticket! A couple of examples for the folks who don’t wanna click through to the ticket:

cable ship Lodbrog will arrive at the repair ground of cable break off Taiwan (755km from HKG) on 21 Aug and the tentative repair completion date is on 30 Aug.

…and then, a bit of a setback:

The tentative commence date and completion date will be on 4 Nov and 10 Nov respectively. This was delay Due to recent Typhoon DuJuan across Taiwan, cable ship Lodbrog is mobilized to first repair EAC segment K and then FLAG segment N, which have higher repair priority. Therefore, the RNAL shunt fault repair will be further postponed.

Holy shit, guys. This isn’t some mom-n-pop shop. We are - to steal a bit of a j-dubs-ism - “on a global basis”.

Full stop.