Cable Cuts Disrupt Internet in Middle East and India, Again

December 19, 2008

Three international submarine cables in the Mediterranean Sea were damaged on Friday, December 19, causing significant disruptions to internet and phone traffic in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, India and all of the Gulf states. The location of the fault was thought to have occurred between Tunisia and Italy. The three damaged cables are the FLAG Europe-Asia cable, operated by Reliance Globalcom, and two consortium cables, SeaMeWe-3 and SeaMeWe-4 owned jointly by several telecommunications companies.

Additionally, there were reports that the GO-1 cable connecting Malta with Sicily had been damaged on the evening of Thursday, December 18. It was not immediately known if the outages were connected.

The current series of faults is reminiscent of the submarine cable faults that occurred in January 2008. Today’s events have the potential to create worse disruptions: while the January 2008 accidents broke two of the three cables connecting Europe with Asia via the Middle East, Friday’s cable failures have caused faults on all three. France Telecom projects that service on all cables will be restored by December 31. Until then, many carriers in the Middle East and South Asia will need to route their European traffic around the globe, through South East Asia and across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

New cable construction should help to prevent such outages in the future, according to TeleGeography Research Director Alan Mauldin. “Many new cable systems are slated to enter service between Europe and Egypt in the next few years, including Telecom Egypt’s TE North cable, Orascom’s MENA system, FLAG’s HAWK cable, the IMEWE consortium cable, and the EIG consortium cable.” Though constructing multiple cables are no guarantee against outages, the introduction of these new systems will provide additional routing options and improve resiliency.