More Undersea Cables Cut

By Greg McNevin

December 22, 2008: For the second time this year, internet connectivity between Europe, the Middle East and the USA has suffered a severe blow, with three out of four primary undersea cables linking Europe to the US being mysteriously damaged.

Telecommunications providers have scrambled to reroute voice and data traffic via cables in Asia and North America, leaving some in the Middle East with no access, and others with hits to network performance.

While the cause for the severing of the cables is currently not known, problems earlier in the year have been tentatively attributed to a rogue ship anchor, so some are saying the current problems are likely to be due to a similar accident.

The outage will continue until the cables are repaired – a process which could take some days due to the sensitivity of the technology involved, and the need to individually re-connect every fiber in the large cables one at a time.

Countries such as Bahrain, Jordan, Yemen and Dubai have suffered performance hits of 25 percent and above, while the Sudan has had no access at all since the cables went down on Friday, leaving significant services such as bank machines offline.

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