Asian Internet Outage

[cosworth151]

Two undersea cables off the Mediterranean coast of Egypt have been cut, causing Internet disruptions from Egypt to Bangladesh. The outages caused a slowdown in traffic on Dubai's stock exchange.

In all, users in India, Pakistan, Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Bahrain were affected. Engineers in several countries were scrambling to reroute traffic to satellites and to other cables.

"There's no sense of how soon the problem will be fixed," he added.

Officials said it could take a week or more to fix the cables, apparently cut north of the Egyptian port city of Alexandria, as they scrambled to reroute traffic to satellites and through Asia.

India's lucrative outsourcing industry is struggling to overcome Internet slowdowns and outages after the cuts sliced the country's bandwidth in half.

If terrorists really want to disrupt the world economy, major internet trunks would seem to be a prime target. Construction of redundent, back-up infrastructure should be a priority.