It's not new that major solar events such as coronal mass ejections (CMEs) can produce large geomagnetically induced currents on the earth's surface that will threaten terrestrial installations like the power grid and, in extreme cases, damage the electronics that power long haul fiber cables. But researcher Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi from the University of California Irvine states that the subsea cable industry underestimates the threat and is unprepared for it saying, "the networking community has largely overlooked this risk during the design of the network topology and geo-distributed systems such as DNS and data centers."