Undersea Web cables snap
Two cut lines deep in the Mediterranean left several nations without access. India is hit big.
NEW DELHI - At least for a while, the World Wide Web wasn't so worldwide.
Two cables that carry Internet traffic deep under the Mediterranean Sea snapped, disrupting service yesterday across a swath of Asia and the Middle East.
India took one of the biggest hits, and the damage from its slowdowns and outages rippled to some U.S. and European companies that rely on India's lucrative outsourcing industry to handle customer-service calls and other operations.
"There's definitely been a slowdown," said Anurag Kuthiala, a system engineer at the New Delhi office of Symantec Corp., a Cupertino, Calif., security-software-maker. "We're able to work, but the system is very slow."
Although disruptions to larger U.S. firms were not widespread, the outage raised questions about the vulnerability of the infrastructure of the Internet. One analyst called it a "wake-up call," and another cautioned that no one was immune.
The cables, which lie undersea north of the Egyptian port of Alexandria, were snapped Wednesday just as the working day was ending in India, so the full effect was not apparent until yesterday.
There was speculation a ship's anchor might be to blame. The two cables, named FLAG Europe-Asia and SeaMeWe-4, are in close proximity.
Egyptian officials said initial attempts to reach the cables were stymied by poor weather. Repairs could take a week once workers arrive at the site, and engineers were scrambling to reroute traffic to satellites and to other cables.
The snapped cables - which lie on the sea floor and at some points are no thicker than the average human thumb - caused problems across an area thousands of miles wide. Bangladesh, Pakistan, Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Bahrain all reported trouble.
But in India, which earns billions of dollars a year from outsourcing, the loss of Internet access was potentially disastrous. The Internet Service Providers' Association of India said the country had lost half its capacity.
Mustafa Alani, an analyst at the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center, said the outage should be a "wake-up call" about the need to better protect vital infrastructure.
"This shows how easy it would be to attack" vital networks, such as the Internet, mobile phones and electronic banking and government services.