Mideast, South Asia Disconnected

CAIRO — Internet services across the Middle East and South Asia were largely disrupted after damage to undersea cables in the Mediterranean left businesses and companies struggling.

"Two of our cables are affected," Mohammed Taymur, a spokesman of Egypt's Telecommunications Ministry, told Agence France Presse (AFP) on Thursday, January 31.

"Everyone will go onto a third cable."

Internet services in a number of countries in the Middle East, Gulf and South Asia were hit after the two submarine cables, which lie between Egypt and Italy, were damaged.

"For the time being we don't know the cause," Taymur said.

"The two cables are a kilometer apart and we don't know what could have affected both at the same time."

Egyptian officials said it would take 12 to 15 days to repair the damage.

In Kuwait, the government announced that "weather conditions and maritime traffic" had damaged two cables, affecting most of the region.

Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Yemen, Qatar and Bahrain were also hit by the disruption.

In India, communications-relying services suffered a drastic drop due to the cables cut thousands of kilometers away in the Mediterranean.

Officials affirmed it may take 15 days for the internet to return to normal.

Neighboring Bangladesh and Sri Lanka were affected as well.

Sri Lanka Telecom, the country's largest Internet service provider, said it has faced problems in service quality but there was no total breakdown in the service.

The state-owned Bangladesh Telegraph and Telephone Board declared that "most of the ISPs and call centers have been partially affected.

"It slowed down the Internet services in the country."

Large-scale disruptions in the Internet are rare but not unknown.

In December 2006, East Asia suffered nearly two months of outages and slow service after an earthquake damaged undersea cables near Taiwan.

Damaged Business

Businesses in countries hit by the outage brace for some serious damage.

"Of course the economy will be affected because of the reliance on Internet," said Egypt's Taymur.

His ministry appealed for Internet users to limit their surfing so as to give priority to businesses.

"People should know how to use the Internet because people who download music and films are going to affect businesses who have more important things to do."

Egypt has a major call center industry which has been affected by the disruption.

The government said call centers were only able to function at 30 percent of their usual capacity.

In Saudi Arabia, state-owned Saudi Telecom reported the loss of more than 50 percent of its international lines.

Bahrain's Batelco appealed for people to limit use to browsing and email to leave enough bandwidth for businesses.

But it was in India, hub of the world's technology industries, where the internet damage left drastic impacts.

"Information-technology companies, software companies and call centers that provide online services to the UK or the US East Coast are the worst affected," said Rajesh Chharia, head of the Internet Service Providers' Association of India.

The country's 11 billion dollar outsourcing industry, which operates from 30 cities and employs 700,000 people, was severely hit.

Up to 1,250 companies that deliver services ranging from answering customer queries to processing credit-card and mortgage applications and analyzing equity markets for global clients, were knocked out by the outage.

IslamOnline.net & News Agencies