This used to happen more often in the past, when copper thieves mistook fiber for conductor. There were cases where critical systems were shut down due to fiber optic theft, and the thieves were caught burning the sheathing to expose the... glass.
... and an incorrect password policy and poor access control. Usually, in these institutions, if STS is not responsible, there are third-party companies, usually proxies, that are responsible for managing the firewall and accessing the data. The lack of procedures and lack of supervision from the authority, combined with the delay from the service providers, leads to a situation where everyone does backups as they think is best. That's why it takes so long now, because STS restores data from different formats, from different places, made at different times
