Egypt: broken undersea cable causes major 'net outage
A damaged undersea cable caused internet connectivity links to Egypt, India and several Gulf region countries to be disrupted today. Authorities in Egypt say services may not return to normal for several days:
LinkIt was not immediately possible to gauge the impact of the disruption on financial institutions. Egypt's telecoms ministry said 70 percent of the country's Internet network was down and India initially said it had lost over half its bandwidth.
"This cut has affected Internet services in Egypt with a partial disruption of 70 percent of the network nationwide," the Egyptian ministry said in a statement.
the latest
latest episodes
I blame Dubai
for most thing takuan, for most things. any US frigates in the area i wonder?
There is some story about a ship's anchor at this point....
You can be assure though, that any nation with submarines is prepared to (or already does) sever submarine cables if it suits a purpose. Perhaps to make sure certain communications go through certain already compromised means.
Either that or someone's drunk on the bridge again.
The first thing I thought of when I read Egypt and Internet was the nondescript building Neal Stephenson mentions in Mother Earth Motherboard. It's an awesome read! Check it out at:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html
A relevant part:
" The adjective Blade-Runneresque means much to those who have seen the movie. (For those who haven't, just keep reading.) I will, however, never again be able to watch Blade Runner, because all of the buildings that looked so cool, so exquisitely art-directed in the movie, will now, to me, look like feeble efforts to capture a few traces of ARENTO's Alexandria station at night.
"
I wonder how this will potentially affect spam, we always note that spam comes from various compromised machines all over, and that the Internet is designed to withstand a nuke blast, it routes around the affected area to get to the destination, but as we have the need to be more and more wired choke points become much more narrow. Spam might be a good indicator of how this affects the system, because no matter what someone in the affected region has a compromised machine or an email address that isn't getting its spam... and its bouncing, would be very interesting to see if anyone does a study on this.
I totally second Hooeezit's recommendation of the Neal Stephenson "Mother Earth Motherboard". Great writing, tons of technical details, a trip around the world, history of telecommunications, ...
I remember thinking - "I would love to read more stuff like that". But I haven't found much. Comparable good tech/human/history texts include Diana Muir's "Reflections in Bullough's Pond" and Ian Jack's "The Crash that Stopped Britain" (very short).
Note that Mother Earth Motherboard is over 40,000 words (i.e. as long as a novel).
Johnrynne: Everything Stephenson writes is like a gift from the gods. But that article is over ten years old, I think. How much of it is still good tech info? And 40 K words is a little short for a novel, but is okay for a novella.
Update: cable repair still ongoing
It's just some cable maintenance guy who doesn't want his girlfriend to call his wife, I'm sure.
Jeff,
Sure it's old. But I value the article not because it's about the latest thing. When I said tech details, I was talking about the art of laying cable in the 19th century (and today), or the tension of jotting down Morse code based on a moving spot of light (Kelvin's mirror galvanometer) in the very early days of trans-Atlantic cables.
My university-age kids can't conceive a world in which there were no computers, when you had to get up off the sofa to change channel on the TV (assuming you had more than one channel), when a phone call to the US cost a small fortune (making it a good idea to book a person-to-person hours in advance), when it might take the phone company 20 years to get around to laying extra land-lines to your village (finally giving you a phone) ...
And what about the art of making phosphorus from urine in the late 17th century?
It's been an EPIC FAIL since Wednesday afternoon here in Mumbai. Connection is verrrry slow for most of the day, then works like normal for a while, then works like molasses again.
At least I know it's not the fault of our local ISP this time.
Yesterday Joel posted on BB Gadgets an article from 1930's Modern Mechanix dealing with the repair of transatlantic lines.
I wonder if it was coincidence? Then again I believe nothing is...
I started reading Neal Stephenson's article again and got something useful out of the first page: namely, how to explain to angry customers why a cable off the Egyptian shore and pointing to Mumbai hosed their ping times between Basel and Hong Kong.
How long is the "internet designed to survive a nuke blast" notion going to live on? Forever?
meanwhile, a few kilometers farther along the cable from the official break, the work on the interceptor hardware is just about done.
Third submarine cable severed in a week!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7222536.stm
I can only quote James Bond: "Once is Happenstance. Twice is Coincidence. The third time it's Enemy action"
having the ability to shut off submarine cables as well as strike satellites is something many nations would covet
Johnrynne, the historical component of article is there. And learning about how urine was used was very cool. I just finished the last of that series. So, why did the gold weigh more?
Iran is blacked out,Israel and Iraq are still connected
something is coming
looks like a sub
http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticleNew.asp?xfile=data/theworld/2008/February/theworld_February77.xml§ion=theworld&col
curious
http://www.dailyscare.com/comment/reply/2955