Internet Outages Strike Two Continents

A major Internet outages across Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, bringing many businesses to a standstill and leaving others struggling to cope has been attributed to damage to an undersea cable in the Mediterranean on Wednesday.

70 percent of the Egypt’s Internet network was down and India’s bandwidth has been cut in half, leaving its money-spinning outsourcing industry trying to redirect traffic to satellites and supplementary cables through Asia, according to reports by Reuters,.

Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Bahrain have also been experiencing harsh connection issues but Israel, Lebanon and Iraq have been able to circumvent the crippling disaster either since the country has been using a dissimilar route or its government has organized backup satellite systems in case of cable malfunction

Above and beyond the Internet, the outage has also been the source of key disruption to television and phone services, creating turmoil for the UAE’s public and private sectors.

According to reports, officials at Egypt’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology think a boat’s anchor may have been the root of the crisis, even though this has yet to be established. The damage has been traced to an undersea cable situated between Alexandria, Egypt and Palermo, Italy.

Government agencies and ISPs from Nothern Africa and the Middle East estimate the damage will take up to two weeks to secure.