Cut in Internet cables off Egypt causes outages across Mideast to India - Haaretz

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Fri., February 01, 2008 Shvat 25, 5768

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		Bad weather has delayed the repair of two cut Internet cables off the coast of Egypt which have caused outages in India, jeopardising U.S. and U.K. telecommunications providers. (Yaron Kaminsky)

Last update - 20:50 31/01/2008

Cut in Internet cables off Egypt causes outages across Mideast to India

By The Associated Press

Tags: india, internet middle east

Fallout spread Thursday from a cut in two undersea Internet cables off Egypt's coast, disrupting half of India's bandwidth and causing widespread outages across the Middle East.

Israel was unaffected by the outages because its Internet traffic is connected to Europe through a different undersea cable. Lebanon and Iraq were also operating normally, while users in India, Pakistan, Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Bahrain were affected. English-language Saudi newspaper Arab News said Saudi Telecom had lost more than 50 percent of its international online connectivity due to the problem.

Outages across India could have serious repercussions worldwide as many U.S. companies outsource back-office operations including customer service call centers there. President of the Internet Service Providers' Association of India, Rajesh Chharia, said companies that serve the East Coast of the United States and Britain had been badly hit.

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"The companies that serve the (U.S.) East coast and the UK are worst affected. The delay is very bad in some cases," Chharia told The Associated Press. "They have to arrange backup plans or they have to accept the poor quality for the time being until the fiber is restored," he said.

Chharia added that some companies were rerouting their service via the Pacific, bypassing the disrupted cables.

Officials said it could take a week or more to fix the cables, in part because of bad weather. Officials in several countries were scrambling to reroute traffic to satellites and to other cables through Asia.

The outage raised questions about the system's vulnerability, with one Gulf analyst calling the incident a 'wake-up call'.

Large-scale Internet disruptions are rare but not unknown. East Asia suffered nearly two months of outages and slow service after an earthquake damaged undersea cables near Taiwan in December 2006. Bad weather was also a major factor in delaying the repair of cables in the area.

At the time of writing, governments in the region had not reported serious disturbances to normal functioning, as backup satellite systems were implemented. However, the outages had caused slowdown in traffic on Dubai's stock exchange Wednesday.

An Egyptian Communications Ministry official cautioned Thursday that workers won't know for sure what caused the cuts in the cables until they are able to get repair ships and divers to the area, off the northern coast of Egypt.

TeleGeography, a U.S. 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 Mideast to Europe by 75 percent, and 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.

Alan Mauldin, research chief at the Washington-based TeleGeography, said similar outages in the future could be averted by new cable construction, even though multiple cables could not guarantee against outages.

Mustafa Alani, head of security and terrorism department at the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center, said the outage should be a wake-up call for governments and professionals to divert more resources to protect vital infrastructure.

"This shows how easy it would be to attack vital networks, such as Internet, mobile phones," he said alluding to the possibility of terrorsit interference in online banking and government services.

"When it comes to great technology, it's not about building it, it's how to protect it," he added.

An official at the Dubai Mercantile Exchange, Gerald David, said trading Thursday morning resumed normally following the Wednesday slowdown after which backup systems kicked in. A Mercantile spokesman said the exchange partnered with Nymex network engineering and rerouted all network traffic from Dubai trading floor to two unaffected circuits.

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1.	Helooo can you hear meee...Persia..	17:49	\|	Stephen,	31/01/08

2.	Offer for Israel to become part of the Arab World still on table?	17:55	\|	Genuine Tosefta	31/01/08

3.	its the `occupation` silly	19:19	\|	alan	31/01/08

4.	Notice how few talkback posts, this afternoon.	19:54	\|	Stephen.	31/01/08

5.	Very humorous, since whole point of internet is redundancy!	19:58	\|	Voice of Reason	31/01/08

6.	That`s why there hasn`t been much SPAM today!	20:12	\|	Tova M.	31/01/08

7.	looks like a dress rehearsal for the real thing	20:57	\|	avner	31/01/08

8.	So much for outsourcing!	21:19	\|	Larry	31/01/08

9.	Voice of Lack of Reason	21:56	\|	Man deVoshkes	31/01/08

10.	Poor lakshmi and indrajaya, pressure buiding up	22:24	\|	Figaro	31/01/08

11.	That`s why no garbage from indrajera	23:03	\|	leo	31/01/08

12.	Blackberry boondoggle	23:28	\|	Elimelech	31/01/08

13.	Pro arab blogger are silent ---great-	23:29	\|	yossi	31/01/08

14.	And no clickfool, no linthwaite...	23:55	\|	MaryRose	31/01/08

15.	Would this mean that Clickfool&Co are actually posting	00:16	\|	Man deVoshkes	01/02/08

16.	Voice of Reason	01:38	\|	schafe82	01/02/08

17.	MaryRose	01:43	\|	schafe82	01/02/08

18.	India should connect through Japan	04:09	\|	Efox	01/02/08

19.	alan	04:43	\|	Mark Lincoln	01/02/08

20.	Clickfool, Dutch & Co are quiet; is this a sign where and who	05:39	\|	Man deVoshkes	01/02/08

21.	to all the bad apples, I think you need those people to survive	05:52	\|	John	01/02/08

22.	shark eat the cables	13:48	\|	blue	01/02/08

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