Conspiracy theories abound over cut cables

 

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By Matthew Sparkes

Posted on 7 Feb 2008 at 10:18

Conspiracy theorists are hard at work in forums around the world, after three undersea internet cables were cut within four days.

Bloggers and commentators have fingered various governments, terrorist groups and, tongue firmly in cheek, sea-monsters, for the outages.

The drama began on 30 January when Flag Telecom detected that one of its cables between Egypt and Italy had been damaged, and worsened two days later when another running between Dubai and Oman was also cut.

The two cables together carried up to 70% of internet traffic between Europe and Asia, and their loss caused dramatic slowdowns in access from within the Middle East.

The disruption was alleviated by re-routing traffic via other routes, and is likely to be completely rectified soon as Flag Telecom's repair ships have already reached both locations.

Initially these cuts were blamed on a ship laying anchor atop the cables in bad weather, but conspiracy theories started to emerge after the Egyptian Government claimed that no ships were present at the time.

"A marine transport committee investigated the traffic of ships in the area, 12 hours before and after the malfunction, where the cables are located to figure out the possibility of being cut by a passing vessel and found out there were no passing ships at that time," says a statement from the Egyptian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology.

On 1 February another cable, not operated by FLAG Telecom, was reportedly cut off the coast of Dubai, affecting traffic in the United Arab Emirates.

Reports of a fourth cable loss were quickly explained as a temporary power-supply problem, and swiftly rectified.

We contacted FLAG Telecom, but a spokesperson was unwilling to comment on the reason behind the failures, or how repairs were progressing.

Although it is unusual to have so many cables damaged within such a short amount of time, the first two cables lay within 400 yards of each other, so could easily have been damaged by the same event.