Internet outage affects two continents

Posted Thursday, 31 January 2008, 12:32 HST @897

From VNUnet.com and UPI: Earlier today two undersea cables that carried Internet traffic to the Middle East, Africa and the Indian subcontinent was damaged. The outage is most noticeable in India, Pakistan, Kuwait and Dubai. Internet traffic has mostly be rerouted to slower cables, and the damaged cables may not be repaired for another week.

No word yet on how this has affected outsourced operations in India. A CNN report claims that Dubai’s financial sector, television stations and telephone services have been affected by the outage. CNN also quotes sources who state that the damage was caused by a ship’s anchor.

Heather Paulson of revenews.com posted a comment that software development firms and their clients are panicking a bit over the situation.

Tags: Africa, Asia, cloud, Dubai, India, Internet, outsource, pakistan, reliability, telecom

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billso

A couple of updates from the AP. India has noticed that their Internet connection is slow. that's what happens when an ISP's main and backup connections to the Internet are cut.

These cables are not very thick – perhaps 2 cm. The two broken cables are in the Mediterranean Sea, near Egypt.

billso

Reuters reports that a third cable has been cut. This cable handled India, and was located about 56 km off of Dubai.

Reuters also reports that India has restored 80 percent of its Internet capacity today.