Lots of comments about lightning, but I believe you are referring to a "ground loop" where the ground/neutral at one site is offset from that of a different site tens or hundreds of meters away. This is why all commonly used RJ-45 Ethernet connections use differential signalling and have the tx/rx pairs isolated by transformers. (Note that PoE Ethernet can still create similar problems if one is not careful.)

Here's a relevant news article about a lawsuit related to this phenomenon:

https://easyreadernews.com/edison-stray-voltage/

https://www.dailybreeze.com/2013/03/19/redondo-beach-woman-a...

https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/woman-wins-4m-verd...