[Zubair]

Internet outages disrupted business and personal usage across a wide swathe of the Middle East on Wednesday after an undersea cable in the Mediterranean was damaged, government officials and Internet service providers said.

In Cairo, the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology said the cut in the international communications cable had led to a partial disruption of Internet services and other telecommunications across much of Egypt.

Emergency teams were quickly trying to find alternative routes, including satellite connections, to end the disruptions, Minister Tariq Kamel said. But service was still slow or nonexistent by late afternoon Wednesday.

Internet service also was disrupted in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates in the Gulf, which markets itself as a top Mideast business and luxury tourist hub. One of two Internet service providers, DU, was completely down.

It was not clear what caused the damage to the cable.

An official who works in the customer care department of DU told The Associated Press that the reason for the outage was a fault on a submarine cable located between Alexandria, Egypt, and Palermo, Italy.

The official, who identified himself only as Hamed because he said he was not authorized to speak publicly, said he was not in a position to describe the technical fault but that engineers contracted by DU were working to solve the problem.

By early afternoon, the service was flooded with complaints and the ISP had found alternative routes but Hamed said "there is slowness while browsing on the Internet."

There was no total outage in Kuwait, but service was interrupted Tuesday and Wednesday. The Gulfnet International Company apologized in an e-mail Wednesday to its customers for the "degraded performance in Internet browsing," which it said was caused by a cable cut in the Mediterranean.

In Saudi Arabia, some users said Internet was functioning fine but others said it was slow or totally down.

A staffer at a Saudi ISP said that employees were told that a cable rupture was the cause of the problem, which began early Wednesday. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media. Calls to Saudi Telecom went unanswered Wednesday afternoon, the start of the weekend in Saudi Arabia.

Users in Bahrain and Qatar also complained of slow Internet.

[Zubair]

India's internet services have been hit badly as around 50 per cent of country's internet bandwidth is reported to be disrupted.

As per the immediate reports of Headlines Today, a news channel, it was stated that the problem started at around 2:00 pm in many parts of the country.

The main cause behind this problem is understood to be the breakdown in an international undersea cable network near Egypt.

"There has been a 50 to 60 per cent cut in bandwidth," Rajesh Chharia, the President of Internet Service Providers Association of India confirmed.

India's BPO and IT companies are the ones most affected by this, as large part of their work is dependent on internet based calls and data transferring.

Reports say that the emergency back up has been activated to give some relief to users, but it might take more than a week for the connection to be completely restored

[Admin]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/urdu/science/st...ption_zs.shtml

[Desert_ Rules]

well Aj FM pe wrong news chal rahi thi, ke cable karachi side se brk howi hai ...

[Zubair]

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.

Hundreds of undersea cables often owned and managed by international consortiums keep telecommunications running worldwide. A surge in phones and Internet connections in Asia and to new financial hubs like Dubai has increased traffic on many of these cables.

Most disrupted communications were quickly rerouted through other cables.

“Some of our customers were impacted” by the damaged cables on Wednesday morning until the company rerouted traffic, said Linda Laughlin, a spokeswoman for Verizon. The company is building a trans-Pacific cable from Oregon to China, South Korea and Taiwan because it needs more capacity in Asia, she said.

A trade group in India estimated that roughly 60 percent of the country’s Internet users were affected, but many large companies switched quickly to backup plans, and business was not significantly disrupted. India is the primary customer service center for many American and European financial services companies, and Indian companies handle back-office operations for many of the world’s largest corporations.

“In some way or another every company took a hit,” said R S Parihar, an executive with the Internet Services Provider’s Association in India. Internet traffic heading east from India was disrupted, and many companies rerouted their Internet traffic to the west instead, he said.

“In the case where people had only one route they were in trouble,” said Mr. Parihar. Smaller companies, or those that did all their business with countries east of India, were the most affected, he said.

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.

Ashutosh Sharma, a spokesman for Bharti Communications, one of India’s largest telecommunications companies, said the company had “taken significant steps to ensure that services are available by routing traffic through alternative paths.” Bharti was working closely with the cable operators to “restore normalcy as soon as possible,” he said

[Zubair]

Services on two of three broken undersea cables providing Internet services to parts of the Middle East and Asia have been restored after both cables were repaired, an Indian-owned cable operator said on Sunday.

FLAG Telecom, a subsidiary of India's No. 2 mobile operator Reliance Communications (RLCM.BO: Quote, Profile, Research), said in a statement the breaks in its FLAG Europe-Asia (FEA) and FALCON cables had been repaired and services routed back through these cables.

Web access in south Asia and parts of the Middle East was disrupted after breaks occurred in segments of two cables off Egypt's northern coast nearly two weeks ago, forcing service providers to re-route traffic.