Vandals severed multiple fiber optic cables on Thursday, leaving thousands of people in Santa Clara, Santa Cruz and San Benito counties without cell phone, Internet and landline service, police said.

Crews were making repairs, but estimated that it would likely be sometime Thursday night before all service was restored. The outage which began about 2 a.m. affected both landlines and cellular phones for various AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile customers.

San Jose Police Sgt. Ronnie Lopez, when asked whether the severed fiber optic cables were the work of vandals, said, "that's a pretty good premise."