A couple of years ago we had to replace the core switches between two of our data centres, a simple task for the most part - these new switches would be state of the art Cisco Catalyst units.
The link between the two sites was a dark fibre, with 8Gb bandwidth running full duplex over a redundant cable pair. It was quite a surprise when we started to tidy up the cables to find this - see the attached images.
The cables comprised two male to male cables, with the ends joined with Bluetack. I'm amazed that it worked for so long. - Actually I'm amazed it worked at all!
I trust that the local fibre welding company sorted your problem. Usually costs �1,000 per half-day. The repair kit is rather expensive to own.
We had a case where BT arrived to install a 100-core telephone cable. Rather than use the vacant duct labelled for the purpose, they decided to pull their cable through a duct which was dedicated to inter-building fibre optic communications. When the cable jammed they used a van to pull the cable. They managed to knock out 13 sites by destroying multiple fibre optic cables. The cable duct lining was also destroyed in the process.
A �100,000 repair was carried out in just three days. This included excavating and repairing the damaged duct and replacing two miles of fibre optic cable). The "engineers" concerned were banned from site.
The second attempt to install the telephone cable was heavily supervised and went without incident.
Wonder if management was impressed with how much they saved... fiber ends cost how much? 
