Cable Breaks Disrupt Middle East and South Asia Internet Access

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From: The Associated Press and Reuters

A massive Internet outage triggered by breaks in cables under the Mediterranean Sea disrupted online access for users in the Middle East and south Asia. But the disrupted service, which forced Internet service providers to reroute traffic, had no discernible impact in the USA and Europe, says Dan Berkowitz, a spokesman for Keynote Systems, which monitors Internet and mobile performance.

IBM's business operations worldwide were not affected. The technology giant has multiple backup systems that can withstand anything from a cable break to earthquakes and inclement weather, company spokesman Jim Larkin said. Intel's online operations were not affected, spokesman Tom Beermann said.

Still, the outage raised questions about the vulnerability of the Internet's infrastructure. The digital blackout disrupted Egyptian financial market operations Wednesday. Web access was also spotty in India and South Africa, according to Keynote. Some firms were trying to reroute Internet traffic via cables in the Pacific, according to Rajesh Chharia, president of the Internet Service Providers Association of India.

Repairs to the breaks, which may have been caused by a ship's anchor, will start Monday and could take a week, the Flag Telecom Group, which operates one of the cables, said Thursday. Customers are being provided with alternatives through other cables, it said. The International Cable Protection Committee, an association of 86 submarine cable operators dedicated to protect submarine cables, says more than 95% of transoceanic telecoms and data traffic are carried by submarine cables, and the rest by satellite.

Egypt's Internet situation is in dire straits after two undersea cables in the Mediterranean were accidentally severed yesterday, cutting off much of the country's access to the outside world. 70 percent of the nation's Internet has been disconnected, according to Egypt's Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, with phone calls to Europe and the US also being disrupted. As a result, the ministry has launched an emergency task force to deal with the situation and has asked the general public to avoid downloading more bandwidth-intensive items for now in order to allow businesses priority.

It's not just Egypt, either; other countries throughout the Middle East also suffered outages, with some being completely disconnected. And both India and Egypt, which run high-volume call centers, have taken a major hit in communications because of the disruption.

"Two of our cables are affected; everyone will go onto a third cable," ministry spokesperson Mohammed Taymur told the AFP. "But that will not be enough bandwidth. [...] People should know how to use the Internet because people who download music and films are going to affect businesses who have more important things to do."

No one is exactly sure what happened to the two cables—the ministry says that they were more than two kilometers away from each other, and that "[t]he break off may have occurred for natural or climatic reasons." Officials hope to have solved the caper of the mysterious cable cutoff within a couple of weeks, the ministry said.

This isn't the first time such a thing has happened. Egypt's ministry says that Algeria, Taiwan, and India have all suffered similar incidents in recent years, although none were as high-profile. Last June, however, some fishermen made headlines by pulling up Vietnam's fiber optic lines in an attempt to salvage scrap copper from the ocean floor. Vietnam's own ministry later acknowledged that the fishermen—and even some officials—had a very "simple understanding" of the consequences of severing the cables.
 
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