Half the world in the dark

Due to a cable being cut in the Mediterranean, the bandwidth of most of Asia has been reduced to a trickle.  While many of us think of the internet as a point to point connection between computers (which it can be), the majority of traffic between continents is routed through underseas fiber optic cables that can carry extremely large amounts of data.

The internet isn't just for WWW-dot-something-dot-com anymore.  The bandwidth carried on these lines includes cable TV, phone traffic, and any other type of data.  International calls used to be mainly carried by satellite, but nobody liked the echo and using broadband is much, much cheaper (if not free, see www.skype.com).  

So we've got half the world without good online access.  Does that affect us?  Of course.  If you didn't get the memo, the world is flat.  When you are calling Dell because your PC broke, that's routed over those lines to India or the Philippines.  Even calling the local pizza store is now often routed overseas.  A good portion of our business is done with the developing Asian market, and speaking of the market, having the Dubai stock exchange process data at an alarmingly slow rate does not help our situation here either.

The big question now is what caused this cable (actually, 2 cables) to break?  The first thing that comes to mind is terrorism.  Cyber terrorism has happened before and will probably happen again.  Last year Russians attacked Estonia's network with DOS attacks, making almost every computer and ATM inoperable in the country.

I think it is very unlikely that this was a terrorist attack.  First, while a lot of economic damage was done, it was done to many, many countries.  This was not a targeted attack.  And the only country in the Middle East that was left largely unaffected was Israel, who would be the logical target.  Unless this was Israel's way of fighting back, which I think is unlikely.

The culprit behind this problem was most likely some type of boat who dropped anchor at the wrong place, or just a lack of maintenance with the cables.  At any rate, it is fascinating to see how much of our world's communication network is carried along by one simple pipe.