Internet outages hit India, Middle East

By MATTHEW ROSENBERG

NEW DELHI

India's lucrative outsourcing industry struggled Thursday to overcome Internet slowdowns and outages after cuts in two undersea cables sliced the country's bandwidth in half.

The disruption -- which has hit a swath of users from Egypt to Bangladesh -- began to affect much of the Middle East on Wednesday, when outages caused a slowdown in traffic on Dubai's stock exchange.

Such large-scale 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.

The cables, which lie off the coast of Egypt in the Mediterranean, were snapped as the working day was ending in India on Wednesday and the impact was not immediately apparent.

But by Thursday, the Internet was sluggish across the country with some users unable to connect at all and others frustrated by spotty service. The Internet Service Providers' Association of India said the country had lost half its bandwidth.

Officials said it could take a week or more to fix the cables, apparently cut north of the Egyptian port city of Alexandria, as they scrambled to reroute traffic to satellites and through Asia.

A top Egyptian telecommunications official said that workers wouldn't know for sure what caused the cuts until they are able to get repair ships and divers to the area, though rumors suggested a ship's anchor was to blame. The official in Egypt's Ministry of Communications and Information Technology asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

Rough weather and seas prevented repair ships from getting to the site Wednesday, the official said -- and it was unclear how soon they could get there.

Even once the repair workers arrive at the site, it could take as long as a week to repair the cable, the official said.

With little hope of immediate relief, Indian companies that rely on the Internet to do business with or for clients in the United States and Europe were just trying to get by.

"The Internet service has been close to nonexistent. Most of our work ... consultation with our overseas customers, is done online. The Internet is our main business tool," said Praveen Mathur, an executive at Streit India Advisory Services Pvt. Ltd., an equity investment consulting firm that's based in New Delhi and has clients in the United States and Canada.

The firm's business, he said, would "definitely be affected" if the outage took a long time to fix.

Rajesh Chharia, president of Internet Service Providers' Association, said some companies were rerouting their service through cables running under the Pacific, but that there was no way to immediately restore all the lost bandwidth.

"The companies that serve the (U.S.) East coast and (Britain) are worst affected. The delay is very bad in some cases," he 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."

Big Indian outsourcing companies, such as Infosys and Wipro, said they were still trying to determine what, if any, disruptions to their work had taken place. Other major foreign companies with significant back-office or technology development operations in India, like IBM Corp. and Intel Corp, said they, too, were trying to assess the impact.

Much of the Middle East continued to feel the impact of the cuts on Thursday.

TeleGeography, a U.S. research group that tracks submarine cables around the world, said the disruption reduced the amount of available capacity on the route from the Mideast to Europe by 75 percent.

Like those in India, many providers in the region will have to reroute their traffic around the globe, to Southeast Asia and across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, the firm said.

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

An official at the Dubai International Mercantile Exchange, Gerald David, said trading Thursday morning resumed normally following the Wednesday slowdown after which backup systems kicked in.

Saudi Telecom Company did not answer calls on Thursday, a day off in the kingdom, but the English-language Saudi newspaper Arab News said Saudi Telecom had lost more than 50 percent of its international online connectivity due to the problem.

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, and most governments in the Middle East seemed to be unaffected, apparently because they had switched to backup satellite systems.

------

Associated Press writers Sam F. Ghattas in Beirut, Pakinam Amer in Cairo, Egypt, and Barbara Surk in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, contributed to this report.

bwwwaaahhaaaaaaaaa. Hope no one has to contact Sony.

__________________
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Israel was unaffected because we all know the Jews control the Media . . . .

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Orgasmatron - 2006 CLS500 90,000 miles
2002 C320 Wagon 122,000 miles
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This type of scenario was talked about in Neal Stephenson's novel Cryptonomicon In the book he discusses rival nations using their navies to threaten to cut cables to hold each other hostage.

Maybe it was a deliberate cut Cyber terrorisism!

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Current
Monika '74 450 SL
BrownHilda '79 280SL
FoxyCleopatra '99 Chevy Suburban
Scarlett 2014 Jeep Cherokee
Krystal 2004 Volvo S60
Gone
'74 Jeep CJ5
'97 Jeep ZJ Laredo
Rudolf ‘86 300SDL
Bruno '81 300SD
Fritzi '84 BMW
'92 Subaru
'96 Impala SS
'71 Buick GS conv
'67 GTO conv
'63 Corvair conv
'57 Nomad

It was that asteroid TU24.

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ha!

and real estate.

__________________
"It's normal for these things to empty your wallet and break your heart in the process."
2012 SLK 350
1987 420 SEL

And banking...

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and windows

I'm wondering what type and size cable that is, and how they plan on fixing it.

(Somebody is going to get overtime pay, that's for sure)

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09 Jetta TDI
1985 300D

Could be we won't see as much of Gurkha for a while.

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1986 300SDL, 362K
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How come m-shop seems a little slow to load today?



- OK..I checked around the web, and found out that Flag Telelcom, is the unlucky company, that had their cable cut. Fiber optic cable, probably the armored stuff, and probably the 66mm stuff.
I'm still curious how they plan of fixing the cable. Do they go below, cut out the damaged section, and piece in some new cable? Splice loss would have to be damn low, to nearly invisible. There would still be two new splices. I suppose if the cut isn't too far from shore, they can lay a new piece from shore, to the cut. This still leaves a splice underwater, but it eliminates a splice case (which must be damn watertight!), and it takes less time.

just thinking out loud...

__________________
It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so. Robert A. Heinlein


09 Jetta TDI
1985 300D

Ha-ha!

Are THEY the ones behind the massive Pella window scandal?

__________________
" We have nothing to fear but the main stream media itself . . . ."- Adapted from Franklin D Roosevelt for the 21st century

OBK #55

1998 Lincoln Continental - Sold
Max 1984 300TD 285,000 miles - Sold
The Dee8gonator 1987 560SEC 196,000 miles - Sold
Orgasmatron - 2006 CLS500 90,000 miles
2002 C320 Wagon 122,000 miles
2016 AMG GTS 12,000 miles

Net has been restored here quite promptly. Everything is back to normal.

Btw FLAG is part of the Indian company Reliance.

http://www.flagtelecom.com/index.cfm?page=4052

FLAG is an ADAE company, part of the Reliance Group of Companies. Reliance is India's largest business house. Whilst our relationship with Reliance brings a strong foundation for growth, plus many complementary skills and assets, we retain our distinct brand identity and carrier neutrality.

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2015 Gurkha with OM616 DI turbo

2014 Rexton W with OM612 VGT