Mass Internet Outages After Cables Cut in Mediterranean Sea from Planck's Constant

One of the problems with modern communications today is that huge amounts of phone traffic goes over IP. We have just learned that three Internet cables in the Mediterranean Sea have been cut this morning, causing massive Internet outages. All of Egypt, 80% of India, and very large swaths of the Middle East have sporadic or completely non-working Internet connections.

My Mediterranean carriers tell me that a ship will leave Saturday morning to fix the cable but won't arrive til Monday and that it may take until after New Year's to fix. Meanwhile carriers are scrambling to find alternate routes.

My company fields hundreds of thousands of calls daily to that area of the world and sadly our Christian customers will not be able to wish their relatives Merry Christmas on Christmas day, usually our busiest of the year where we see a few million calls in the space of 24 hours.

Some of my readers may recall that undersea cables were also damaged in January, causing outages in the Mideast and India.

Some news services are reporting that Internet services in Egypt are expected to improve in 12 hours but this will be due to alternate sources such as satellite and backup routes via southeast Asia which will suffice for Internet traffic but will not help in phone conversations that require better quality of service connections.

The cause of the cut is unclear but currently there is no indication of an attack. The cables run from northern Egypt to southern Italy. Although the cables are fairly deep the likeliest causes are usually anchors dragging through the bottom of the ocean.

If any of my readers use phone cards to call North Africa, the Middle East, or India, expect no connections or very bad connections for the next 10 days. If you have a product complaint that is normally routed to Indian call centers you may experience delays or no connection at all. It depends on how fast alternate routes are established. It may be chaos for a while with trading and brokerage accounts and other business transactions affected. This is not supposed to happen. Usually one cable line a year is cut and the second line picks up the traffic but this is a rare case where more than one cable is cut.

The cable cut affects 12 countries: Bangladesh, Egypt, France, India, Indonesia, Italy, Malaysia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Sri Lanka, and United Arab Emirates.

Sadly at least 15% of my visitors come from that area of the world and so there will be some 500 poor souls that will not get their daily dose of Planck's Constant.