News: 5 undersea cables to Middle East damaged

[dracodraconis]

As of February 1, a total of 5 undersea cables, operated by two cable operators, have suffered faults that have left 1.7 million Internet users in the United Arab Emirates offline.  Telephone and Internet traffic to countries like Egypt, Iran and Dubia have been reduced by more than 70% according to some reports. More distant countries like India have experienced a 50% loss in bandwidth, affecting services like call centres. It is theorized that a ship's anchor snagged a cable during a recent storm... unless you prefer the many conspiracy theories that are emerging. Found on Slashdot. Edit: Check out siderea's post (http://siderea.livejournal.com/556026.html) for some interesting information on undersea cables.

Comments

[lyanna-beth.livejournal.com]

Depends on the depths the cables were at...

[dracodraconis.livejournal.com]

True. I'm guessing they were in the Mediterranean so they weren't excessively deep, but I haven't seen anything about where they were located, except that they were running through the same narrow section of water.

[siderea]

See my most recent post.

[dracodraconis.livejournal.com]

Ah, that clears things up quite a bit.

[dracodraconis.livejournal.com]

I should have read the articles more closely. I was under the impression from my quick read-through that they were all in the same section of water. That appears not to be the case.

[siderea]

AHH!! THANK YOU! Finally, the names of which particular cables were cut.

FLAG, huh?

[ancalagon-tb.livejournal.com]

Here is a link to the wikipedia article on the issue

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_submarine_cable_disruption

there is a map showing the locations of the cuts. Seems a bit... odd to me.

[ancalagon-tb.livejournal.com]

(it has the names of all the cables)

[dracodraconis.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... so much for the theory that they were all passing through the same section of water. Breaks within the span of a week, spread all around the Middle East. No wonder conspiracy theorists are having a field day.

[ancalagon-tb.livejournal.com]

It's troubling.

These breaks are somewhat rare, and to have 5 breaks like this within a week, due to separate incidents, seemingly to isolate one specific area?

The "non conspiracy theory" answer (random events) is a bit hard to swallow isn't it?

[ancalagon-tb.livejournal.com]

... and now someone has pointed out that cable breaks happen quite frequently. So one of my assumption was wrong. Maybe it is a coincidence after all...