Cable Cut Disrupts India Call Centers

Cable cuts that damaged two undersea Internet cables off Egypt's coast now are disrupting call centers in India, the Wall Street Journal reports. Reportedly, about half of India's Internet bandwidth now is disrupted, and voice traffic to the United States and Europe also are affected.

It could take a week or two to fix the cables, in part because of bad weather, some executives say.

Users in India, Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Bahrain are affected by the outages.

Observers think an anchor might have snagged the cables. At least that's what Flag Telecom Group Ltd. now believes. The incident took place 8.3 kilometers (5.2 miles) from Alexandria beach in northern Egypt.

Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Co., the United Arab Emirates' second-biggest mobile-phone company, is working with the cable operators, Flag Telecom and SEA-ME-WE 4, to find out why the cables were cut and to determine when service can be restored.

The outage is a reminder that physical infrastructure, however mundane, underlies all of modern computing and communications. It's also a reminder that if your business or life depends on Internet-based communications, commerce and content, you need a diversity strategy. It costs more money. But so does inability to do your work.