Massive Internet Disruption After Undersea Cables Break
Jihad Against the Internet in Muslim Countries. Unable to cut the flow of Christianity and Western Culture pouring through the Internet into Muslim nations certain groups of Muslim extremists have for the second time attacked undersea cables attacking again cables in the Mediterranean Sea The attack is largely affecting Internet traffic between the Middle East, India and the US. The first attack about a year ago was quickly declared as “accidental” damage that was done by boat anchors. Despite all the talk at the time we saw clearly that this was a move by Muslim extremists, and saw also that the first attack was a test, a probe, of the Internet to see what effect their attack might have. This now is a much more concerted effort. Part of the problem is that the undersea cables and the routes they take are information that is readily available and like the Muslim Pirates commandeering ships at will, these Muslim Internet Jihadists will cut increasing numbers of these cables at will until they are either hunted down and terminated or the Middle East Internet connection is blacked out altogether. Once a black out is accomplished they can move on to bringing nations and entire regions into black out and begin ransoming Internet connectivity.

Times Online

December 19, 2008

Millions of people across the Middle East and Asia have lost access to the internet after two undersea cables in the Mediterranean suffered severe damage.

Huge numbers in Egypt and India were left struggling to get online as a result of the outage, when the major internet pipeline between Egypt and Italy was cut.

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) throughout the region, including those in United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, also reported problems. International telephone calls, which have also been affected, are being rerouted to work around the problem.

Industry experts told The Times that two sub-sea cables went down just off Alexandra, causing the mass disruption. It happens to a single cable typically once a year, and companies have developed the fail-safe of redirecting traffic to a second cable should this occur.

“It is incredibly rare to experience a dual-break where both cables are down simultaneously,” said a spokesperson for Interoute, the internet networks company.

The Egyptian ministry said it will take “several days” for cables to be repaired and is trying to reroute Egypt’s internet connections.

Indian ISPs said their problems were due to the cable damage off Egypt. Speaking to reporters, Rajesh Chharia, president of the Internet Service Providers’ Association of India, said: "Information technology companies, software companies and call centres that provide online services to the UK or the US east coast are the worst affected."

Rafaat Hindy, from the Egyptian ministry, said: "Despite this being an international cable affecting many Gulf and Arab countries, we are closest to it and so we have a lot of responsibility.

"We are working as fast as we can."

It is thought that up to 70 per cent of web services in Egypt, and 60 per cent in India, were disrupted yesterday. There were reports that phone and internet difficulties had spread to Yemen, Sudan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

The shut down will take several days to fix, and could have a major impact on the region and across the world. It is likely to hit businesses who will struggle to communicate in the affected countries. Call-centres who work for British companies are likely to be offline or hard to contact in the coming days. Others warned that bank and stock market trading could be affected.

The digital blackout highlighted the vulnerability of global communications. Hundreds of millions of people access the web, but the vast majority of international traffic runs through a a small amount of cables submerged below the sea.

Industry insiders warned that a domino effect was occurring today, causing the disruption to spread across the globe. As companies’ private internet services went down, workers were forced to use the public internet and mobile phones to communicate. This has resulted in a heavy strain on phone and internet networks, meaning calls could go down and cause the internet to become slower or blackout completely.