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Millions in Middle East Lose Internet
Posted by
samzenpus
on Thu Jan 31, 2008 02:54 AM
from the no-web-for-you dept.
from the no-web-for-you dept.
Shipwack writes "Tens of millions of internet users across the Middle East and Asia have been left without access to the web after a technical fault cut millions of connections.
The outage, which is being blamed on a fault in a single undersea cable, has severely restricted internet access in countries including India, Egypt and Saudi Arabia and left huge numbers of people struggling to get online.
Observers say that the digital blackout first struck yesterday morning, with Egypt's communications ministry suggesting it was caused by a cut in a major internet pipeline linking it to Europe."
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Egypt Calls for Bandwidth Rationing 182 comments
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Egypt's Ministry of Communications and Information Technology has called upon its citizens to ration their internet usage. This comes after two of its three undersea fiber optic links were recently severed. The cut cables have caused communication difficulties for millions of people throughout the Middle East. Ministry spokesman Mohammed Taymur was quoted as saying, '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.'"
[+]
Technology: Fourth Undersea Cable Taken Offline In Less Than a Week 499 comments
An anonymous reader writes "Another undersea cable was taken offline on Friday, this one connecting Qatar and UAE. 'The [outage] caused major problems for internet users in Qatar over the weekend, but Qtel's loss of capacity has been kept below 40% thanks to what the telecom said was a large number of alternative routes for transmission. It is not yet clear how badly telecom and internet services have been affected in the UAE.' In related news it's been confirmed that the two cables near Egypt were not cut by ship anchors." Update: 02/04 07:13 GMT by Z : A commenter notes that despite the language in the article indicated a break or malfunction, the cable wasn't cut. It was taken offline due to power issues.
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redundancy (Score:5, Funny)
isn't this why we are supposed to have system redundancy? so a failure in one area won't cause a complete blackout?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, who actually has the responsibility for the cable? No telling how long the accountant types on each end will bicker. I just hope that
Re:redundancy (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:redundancy (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: Used over and over (Score:3, Funny)
DJIADNADSD.
"Dammit, Jim, I'm a Doctor, not a Deep Sea Diver!" (RIP DeForrest Kelley.)
Such acronyms will be used forever to indicate being coaxed to speculate outside one's area of professional expertise.
Re:redundancy (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:redundancy (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:redundancy (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:redundancy (Score:5, Insightful)
That's what I thought. This probably isn't a case of "Middle East Loses Internet", more a case of "Millions in Middle East Now Using One Fibre Connection Instead Of Two".
Like when a major motorway gets closed due to an accident, and every road within a hundred mile radius is choked for the rest of the day.
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Reading this... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Reading this... (Score:5, Funny)
Or someone forgot to pay the bill...
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Re:Reading this... (Score:4, Funny)
Or someone forgot to pay the bill...
An overdue bill or invasion!
Three things: An overdue bill, invasion, or a hardware failure. FOUR possibilities...no, Amongst the possibilities are such incidents as...
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Re:redundancy (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course the phone-modem connection isn't useful for any serious download, but I'm never helplessly disconnected from e-mail, news, slashdot etc.
Re:redundancy (Score:5, Insightful)
Sometimes this is the case. But you also get the likes of soldiers borrowing phones from journalists because they work better than military radios.
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You know you're a geek... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:You know you're a geek... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:You know you're a geek... (Score:5, Insightful)
Internet split into two independent networks due to broken cable
Europe and America cut from the internet
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Re:You know you're a geek... (Score:4, Funny)
"Fog on the Thames. Continent cut off."
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
"Fog in the channel - continent isolated".
Re:You know you're a geek... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:You know you're a geek... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Information warfare? (Score:5, Insightful)
Unlikely (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Unlikely (Score:5, Interesting)
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Anchor (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Information warfare? (Score:5, Interesting)
Clicky clicky: http://www.reuters.com/article/internetNews/idUSHAN1727620070607?feedType=RSS [reuters.com]
*snip*
State-run newspapers said an 11-km (7-mile) section of stolen TVH fibre-optic cable would be replaced at a cost of $5.8 million. It was part of the line that transmits data from Vietnam to Thailand and Hong Kong.
In all, about 43 km (27 miles) of fibre-optic cable is missing, including about 32 km (20 miles) stolen from a cable operated by a Singaporean company.
Parent
Re:Information warfare? (Score:5, Funny)
wow - they even have a recording of the salvage operation taking place!
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
How apropos!
Response Conjecture (Score:3, Insightful)
This is final proof that Russia can be cut off from "the internet".
Now about that Storm bot net....
Re:Response Conjecture (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
hmmm..... (Score:4, Insightful)
its a 'web' (Score:3, Interesting)
They must have their own servers, anything going into that cable is just a 'foreign' request.
Those are important - sure, but i would gather they dont make up more then 40% of all requests.
But only some of the routes should be down, and they still should have a very large lan, with dns, www, email and anything else they have on the spot, and im willing to bet that the ISP's there have stuff like that.
IIRC the web wasnt just designed to be foolproof, it was also designed to be autonomus once disconected from other networks.
Or am i missing something here, and all that they have is cables, no other infrastructure ?
Really? (Score:5, Funny)
Deep breath, Rie.
*inhale*
I think the Danish cartoon controversy was really overblown.
A lot more information (Score:4, Informative)
It was both the Flag Telecom and SEA-ME-WEA 4 cables outside of Alexandria, Egypt. The SEA-ME-WEA 3 cable is apparently OK.
In long distance telecommunications, you really need another path going "the other way around" to be safe. For example, many of the large companies with back-offices in India pay for routes both over the Atlantic to the Middle East to India (which might have been broken by this) and also West Coast to Pacific to Singapore to India (which would not have been).
At AmericaFree.TV, the steady Egyptian audience went to zero yesterday, presumably because of the break, while the audience in Iran, Iraq, the GCC, Pakistan and India did not seem to be affected.
Obligatory SW (Score:4, Funny)
CORRECTION: Two undersea cables not one (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/business/worldbusiness/31cable.html?ref=business [nytimes.com]
Two undersea telecommunication cables were cut on Tuesday evening, knocking out Internet access to much of Egypt, disrupting the world's back office in India and slowing down service for some Verizon customers.
One cable was damaged near Alexandria, Egypt, and the other in the waters off Marseille, France, telecommunications operators said. The two cables, which are separately managed and operated, were damaged within hours of each other. Damage to undersea cables, while rare, can result from movement of geologic faults or possibly from the dragging anchor of a ship.
One of the affected cables stretches from France through the Mediterranean and Red Seas, then around India to Singapore. Known as Sea Me We 4, the cable is owned by 16 telecommunications companies along its route.
The second cable, known as the Flag (for Fiber-optic Link Around the Globe) System, runs from Britain to Japan.
http://www.ndtv.com/convergence/ndtv/story.aspx?id=NEWEN20080039928&ch=1/31/2008%208:29:00%20AM [ndtv.com]
Internet service providers in India have put the disruption at 60 per cent of normal services while those in Egypt have been affected up to 70 per cent.
Well, it didn't happen in Israel (Score:3, Interesting)
Lucky us!
Why not follow this simple precaution? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Why not follow this simple precaution? (Score:5, Funny)
Not everyone is working for the NSA.
Parent
The tubes are full... of water (Score:5, Funny)
First they need to blow some air down the tube and inspect the tube for bubbles, then put a patch over it. Once that is done, they'll need to drain all of the water out of the tube, possibly just by blowing air down it some more. Finally, they will be able to allow data to flow again. The first few gigabytes are probably going to come through a bit damp, but after that it should be fine.
In graph form (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm Vaguely Amused... (Score:5, Funny)
... by the fact that news.bbc.co.uk [bbc.co.uk] is asking for comments from anyone affected. Paraplegics, take one step forward...
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Too sensationalist, tone it down will ya? Schools are STILL teaching real math and real science, despite all you doomsday theorists out there. This is especially true at the university level, where education is as good as it's always been.
You pick one example of a '60s era tech that has survived the ages, and conveniently forget the many thousands of inventions that never made it this far, and never made it long enough for us to even REMEMBER. Then you conveniently ignore all of the genius inventions bein
Not TCP (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Old news, but provides a fine example of TCP/IP (Score:5, Interesting)
Guess TCP was able route the packets through alternate gateways after detecting the problem.
1. TCP has nothing to do with routing packets. 2. IP also has nothing to do with selecting an "alternate gateway" after "detecting a problem". 3. If it was down for an hour, then I don't think this was anything to do with magical routing protocols. Human interaction was required to either repair the broken link or set up an alternate path.
According to the article:
"There has been a 50% to 60% cut in bandwidth," Rajesh Charia, president of the Internet Service Providers' Association of India told Reuters.
So it sounds like not every ISP was able to use the alternate path, and the alternate path didn't have sufficient bandwidth for those that could, anyway.
Mind you, the article then comes out with this astonishing "fact":
Is this the new version of the Majestik 12 that run the world?
I'm guessing this is a reference to [A-M].root-servers.net, but I'm pretty sure none of those are actually a single server, and several have multiple physical locations. Even so, the vast majority of even remotely popular sites will have their nameserver entries cached at a bazillion ISP DNS caches.
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Re:Old news, but provides a fine example of TCP/IP (Score:5, Informative)
We're a big outfit that spends many millions on network infrastructure, so we have some clout with the various telcos and ISPs. We're all right Jack. You've got to wonder if any small company is going to be able to do the same thing. Presumably most of them will be relying on their ISPs, and those ISPs are presumably also going to prioritise their biggest customers as well...
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Re:SEA-ME-WE 3? (Score:5, Informative)
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