Middle East and Asia lose internet access after cable fails This article was first published on guardian.co.uk<http://www.guardian.co.uk/>on Wednesday January 30 2008. It was last updated at 16:23 on January 30 2008.
[image: HP factory, Bangalore] Photograph: AFP Huge swathes of the Middle East and Asia have been left without internet access after a vital undersea cable was damaged. A fault in the pipeline, which runs between Sicily and Egypt, has dramatically reduced access in countries including Saudi Arabia, Dubai and India, leaving millions of workers struggling to get online. It is not yet clear what is wrong with the undersea cable, but the effects are already being felt across the region. Reports from the Middle East suggest that most countries are almost completely without access to the internet, while authorities in Mumbai have said that more than half of India's bandwidth has been lost. "There has been a 50 to 60% cut in bandwidth," Rajesh Charia, president of the Internet Service Providers' Association of India, told Reuters. The outage could have drastic impacts around the globe. Not only will the lack of connectivity strike the technology industry, including India's so-called Silicon City of Bangalore, but the banking industry is also likely to suffer as stock markets struggle to complete international trades. Despite the vast number of individuals who have access to the web, nearly all the internet's traffic is routed through a small number of cables submerged deep below the planet's sea beds. In 2003, net access in western Europe was hit by a fault in a cable running between the US and France, while communications in Asia were severely disrupted in 2006 by seismic activity. An earthquake measuring 7.1 on the Richter scale occurred off the coast of Taiwan, and damaged cables connecting South Korea, China, Japan and Singapore. As well as leaving two people dead, the outage severely reduced internet access and other communications for several days.
