Optical fiber itself does not pick up an electromagnetic pulse the way copper does. That fact gets repeated until it sounds like the network is safe. The transmitters, receivers, power supplies, and the grid that feeds the huts are still ordinary electronics on ordinary electricity.

Copper collects a pulse because it is a long conductor. Glass does not, in the same way. The sentence is true and regularly abused. Every span of fiber ends in a box that transmits, receives, times, and powers the light. Those boxes sit in huts and offices that take power from the same grid as a grocery store.

A pulse or a blackout that spares the glass can still darken the network by killing the boxes or starving them of power. Backup batteries in telecom huts are sized for hours, sometimes a day, rarely a month.

When the batteries die, the hut does not route around itself. Traffic that depended on it stops, even if another city’s glass is intact. Generators, where they exist, bring the fuel problem back: a tank, a way to start, a truck that may be serving a long list of quiet sites.

The same story sits at the end of the drop. The fiber modem on your wall has a power brick. The router beside it has another. A charged phone on a dead home network is a local object, not a connection. If you counted on the modem, you counted on the brick and on the hut upstream.

If your plan for news is “the internet will route around it,” ask what the internet runs on after the batteries die.

Routing around a cut fiber is a real feature of a network with spare paths. Routing around a dead power supply is not. After the batteries, the path is dark until power or a replacement box arrives. Plan on radio and paper for anything you need in that window, and treat a live connection as a bonus rather than the spine.