Jihad Sites Down… No Telling When Services Will Resume
3 of 4 undersea internet cables cut
3 of the 4 cables that route internet traffic from Asia to North America have inexplicably been cut. The Internet cables were cut off the coast of the Italian island of Sicily.
High-technology services across large tracts of Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, brought many businesses to a standstill and left others struggling to cope.
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.
Physical breaks to undersea communications cables take at the very least several days and on occasion weeks to repair, due to the technical difficulties involved and requirement of specialized cable ships to reach the scene.
This isn’t the first time it’s happened -there was a similar situation in February.
Seems we don’t need to worry:
This kind of damage is rarely such a deep concern in the United States and Europe. The Atlantic and Pacific Oceans are crisscrossed so completely with fast fiber networks that a break in one area typically has no significant effect. Net traffic simply uses one of many possible alternate destinations to reach its goal.
Not so with the route connecting Europe to Egypt, and from there to the Middle East. Today, just three major data cables stretch from Italy to Egypt and run down the Suez Canal, and from there to much of the Middle East. (A separate line connects Italy with Israel.) A serious cut here is immediately obvious across the region, and a double cut can be crippling.
The cause is unknown, as was the case in the February cuts. Hmmm.
UPDATE:
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.
