Internet Outage Blacks Out India
SkyNews
By Sky News SkyNews - 58 minutes ago
Huge disruption of the internet is damaging businesses in the Middle East and India after undersea cables were cut.
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The damage was caused under the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Egypt and could take a week to repair.
The cables carry computer traffic from Europe and is hitting India's lucrative outsourcing industry. The disruption cost India half its bandwidth.
While larger companies with sophisticated backups appeared equipped to handle the situation, smaller firms said they will lose business if full internet access is not quickly restored.
The outage has raised questions about the system's vulnerability.
A Gulf analyst called it a "wake-up call," while one in London cautioned that no one, including the West, was immune to such disruptions.
They could have a "massive impact on businesses," said Alex Burmaster from Nielsen Online in London, adding that ordinary people "probably couldn't imagine" life without the internet.
The Mediterranean Sea cables, which lie north of the Egyptian port of Alexandria, snapped on Wednesday.
The Internet Service Providers' Association of India said the country had lost half its bandwidth, and TeleGeography, a US research group that tracks submarine cables, said the disruption reduced the capacity on the route from the Mideast to Europe by 75 percent.
Such large-scale disruptions are rare but not unknown.
East Asia suffered nearly two months of outages and slow service after an earthquake damaged undersea cables near Taiwan in 2006.
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