Multiple Cable Failures Cut Asia Communications

Three transatlantic internet cables that to link much of the middle Eastern gulf region and some of South Asia to the internet have been fully or partly cut, leaving as many as 100 million users in the region without access. The causes of the cable disruptions are as yet unclear.

Users first reported internet outages last Wednesday. The problem was initially blamed on damage to only one underwater cable. The lines were originally believed to have been cut by a ship's anchor dragging across the sea floor, but this explanation has since been dismissed.

Since other outages have been reported, it has become clear that three separate cables — not one — were severed. That's led to speculation that the disruptions may be neither accidental nor coincidental.

The two cables affected are the SeaMeWe-4, and the FLAG Europe-Asia — two of the three cables that wire Asia (and the middle East) with Europe. Stephan Beckert of TeleGeography, a firm that studies global communications systems, said these two cables provide 76 percent of the bandwidth that connects the Middle East and Asia with Europe.

According to recent press reports, roughly 70 percent of Egypt's bandwidth has been disrupted, for example, and as much as 60 percent of India's.

The outages have affected countries that line the Gulf Coast, including Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Algeria, and Sudan.

Other nations in the region, including Turkey and Israel, were not affected because they connect to the web via a different submarine cable — a cable to which much of Europe is also wired.

The third damaged cable, called the FLAG Falcon cable, is an intra-Asian line that runs roughly from Mumbai, India, to Suez, Egypt. It was not damaged as badly as the other two.

In a separate incident, an underwater fiber optic cable between Qatar and the United Arab Emirates went out of service today, though a power failure is suspected in that incident.

Though the cause of the cable destruction remains unclear, Beckert, the TeleGeography analyst, said he believes that they are most likely the result of natural damage. "It's weird, but cables do go out regularly," Beckert said. It's an odd confluence of issues, but I think that it's also different issues related to different countries."

Though some internet connections in the region have been routed along different cables restoring some internet access, most of the access lost by these outages will not be restored until the cables have been physically restored.

by David Levine