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Saturday, December 20, 2008

Undersea Cables Cut; 14 Countries Lose Web

Fra-gee-lay, to be sure.

"A France Telecom report listed 14 countries affected by the current problem. The Maldives are 100 percent down, followed by India, which has 82 percent disruption. Qatar, Djibouti and the United Arab Emirates were the next most widely affected areas with about 70 percent service interrupted. Disruptions for Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan range from 51 percent to 55 percent."

The conspiracy theorists are in full foil hat mode, but initial investigations claim that at least one of the cuts was caused by a ship's anchor. The official word from the industry is 'we don't know'.
"The International Cable Protection Committee, an association of submarine cable operators, said on its website it was aware of multiple submarine cable failures affecting Internet speeds on some routes but did not know what had caused the problem."

Others speculate that seismic activity in the Mediterranean caused at least one break. As a result, many phone connections are out between the Mid-East and Europe, but still available to the U.S. of A.
"Officials with AT&T Inc and Verizon Communications, the two largest U.S.-based carriers, said some customers in the Middle East had lost all service, while others were experiencing partial disruptions on Internet connections."

Re-routing signals is marginal at best, and there's no word on how long repairs will take to restore service.