After reading the fantastic conspiracy theories, I must refer to Occam's Razor ("wiki" it). I have to believe that someone is repeatedly dropping Occam's Razor and cutting the undersea cables. This is a high-visibility item only because of the great boom in Internet traffic in recent years. Cables get cut all the time. Older cables were wire and resulted in fewer channels lost per incident. Modern cables are fiberoptic and "chock full o' channels". It is considered cheaper to repair damaged cables in that area, precisely because it is shallow, rather than going to expense of properly entrenching them.