Internet failure hits two continents

[EV_Ares]

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (CNN) -- High-technology services across large tracts of Asia, the Middle East and North Africa were crippled Thursday following a widespread Internet failure which brought many businesses to a standstill and left others struggling to cope.

Hi-tech Dubai has been hit hard by an Internet outage apparently caused by a cut undersea cable.

Industry experts are blaming damage to two undersea cables but it is not known what caused the damage.

Reports say that Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain Pakistan and India, are all experiencing severe problems.

Nations that have been spared the chaos include Israel -- whose traffic uses a different route -- and Lebanon and Iraq. Many Middle East governments have backup satellite systems in case of cable failure.

Stephan Beckert, an analyst with TeleGeography, a research company that consults on global Internet issues, said the damaged cables collectively account for the majority of international communications between Europe and the Middle East.

Du, a state-owned Dubai telecom provider, attributed the outage to an undersea cable cut between Alexandria, Egypt and Palermo, Italy, according to an internal memo obtained by CNN.

In India, Spectranet and Telecomasia.net, two large Internet service providers were experiencing problems. Reliance, a third major Indian Internet provider, said it was not affected.

An official at Egypt's Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, speaking on condition of anonymity told AP it was believed that a boat's anchor may have caused the problems, although this was unconfirmed. Beckert agreed that was a likely cause.

entire article @ link: http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/01/31/dubai.outage/index.html#cnnSTCText

[HopeforChange]

1. Outsourcing or Best shoring wake up call

[EV_Ares]

7. India wrestles with internet outage

Countries affected by the outage rerouted traffic to satellites and to other cables. Internet disruption effecting users in India and the Middle East looks set to trouble India's lucrative {outsourcing industry} and could in turn impact international businesses that rely on it.

India on Thursday struggled to overcome internet slowdowns and outages, which came after two undersea cables off the coast of Egypt were damaged.

The incident has halved India's bandwidth.

Outsourcing firms, such as Infosys and Wipro, and US companies with significant back-office and research and development operations in India, such as IBM and Intel, said they were still trying to asses how their operations had been impacted, if at all.

Rajesh Chharia, the president of the Internet Service Providers' Association of India, said companies that serve the east coast of the US and Britain had been badly hit.

"The companies that serve the east coast and the UK are worst affected. The delay is very bad in some cases," Chharia was quoted by the Associated Press as saying.

"They have to arrange backup plans or they have to accept the poor quality for the time being until the fiber is restored."

Internet traffic rerouted

Praveen Mathur, an executive at Streit India Advisory Services, an equity investment consulting firm based in New Delhi with clients in the US and Canada, said the company's business would "definitely be affected" if the outage took a long time to fix.

"The internet service has been close to nonexistent"

Praveen Mathur,
Steit India executive


"The internet service has been close to nonexistent. Most of our ... consultation with our overseas customers is done online. The internet is our main business tool," he said.

TeleGeography, a US research group that tracks submarine cables around the world, said the Mediterranean undersea cable cuts reduced the amount of available capacity on the route from the Middle East to Europe by 75 per cent.

The group warned that until service was restored, many providers in Egypt and the Middle East would have to reroute their traffic around the globe, to Southeast Asia and across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

Officials said it could take a week or more to fix the cables and several countries affected by the outage moved to reroute traffic to satellites and to other cables through Asia.

Such large-scale disruptions are rare but have occurred before. East Asia suffered nearly two months of outages and slow service after an earthquake damaged undersea cables near Taiwan in December 2006.

Link: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/19873/213/

[Donk Yore]

2. damn

"a boat's anchor may have caused the problems"

Who woulda thunk it coulda been so simple to cripple a continent's internet service?

Terraistic anchor. Anyone seen Ron Burgundy around lately?

[aquart]

3. Submarine propeller (do they have them)?

What the hell else could cut a deep sea cable?

[MindPilot]

10. Yeah, but

The cables lie right on the ocean floor; if *any* part of a submarine hit the cable there would very likely be a missing submarine in addition to a slow Internet connection.

[BleedingHeartPatriot]

4. Welcome to DU.

:toast:

[Donk Yore]

5. Thanks!

I better type fast in case someone drops an anchor on the western hemisphere's internet connection ability!

:toast:

[BleedingHeartPatriot]

6. I hate when underseas cables are accidentally cut.

[BlueJazz]

8. I keep seeing a Greg larson (the Far Side) cartoon...

...where 2 large crabs are standing by a large cable and one says: "Hey Bob..want to have some fun? "

[JCMach1]

9. The case is overstated... I am posting this from the UAE... here it has only led to a

bit of slowdown on the net nothing major... The story carries the drama a bit too far... :shrug:

[Swamp Rat]

11. testing... 1 , 2, snip!