Millions lose internet after cable accident

A SIMPLE accident involving a ship’s anchor wrecked internet access for a huge slice of the world yesterday.

Experts said the chaos caused by the severing of two undersea cables pointed to the system’s vulnerability to terrorist or other attacks. After the cables were cut by the anchor off Egypt’s coast, India woke to its network in chaos. Widespread service failures also hampered a wide swathe of the Middle East.

Officials said it could take a week or more to fix the cables, in part because of bad weather. Several countries were struggling to reroute traffic to satellites and to other cables through Asia. In all, users in India, Pakistan, Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Bahrain were affected. Israel escaped because its internet traffic is connected to Europe through a different undersea cable, and Lebanon and Iraq were normal.

The biggest impact to the rest of the world could come from the loss of service across India where many Western companies have operations including customer service call centres.

So far, most governments in the region appeared to be operating normally, apparently because they had switched to backup satellite systems. However, the failures caused a slowdown intraffic on Dubai’s stockexchange.

The president of the Internet Service Providers’ Association of India, Rajesh Chharia, said companies that serve the East Coast of the US and Britain had been badly hit.