Internet failure hits two continents

[Richard]

From CNN's Elham Nakhlawai and Mustafa Al Arab
    
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (CNN) -- Large swathes of Asia, the Middle East and north Africa had their high-technology services crippled Thursday following a widespread Internet failure which brought many businesses to a standstill and left others struggling to cope.

Hi-tech Dubai has been hit hard by an Internet outage apparently caused by a cut undersea cable.

One major telecommunications provider blamed the outage, which started Wednesday, on a major undersea cable failure in the Mediterranean.

India's Internet bandwidth has been sliced in half, The Associated Press reported, leaving its lucrative outsourcing industry trying to reroute traffic to satellites and other cables through Asia.

Reports say that Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Bahrain are also experiencing severe problems.

Nations that have been spared the chaos include Israel -- whose traffic uses a different route -- and Lebanon and Iraq. Many Middle East governments have backup satellite systems in case of cable failure.

There were contradictory reports on the real cause behind the disruption, but Du, a state-owned Dubai telecom provider, attributed it to an undersea cable cut between Alexandria, Egypt and Palermo, Italy.

An official at Egypt's Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, speaking on condition of anonymity, said it was believed that a boat's anchor may have caused the problems, although this was unconfirmed, AP reported. He added that it might take up to a week to repair the fault.

Kuwait's Ministry of Communications said the problem could take two weeks to solve, according to a statement carried by the state news agency, KUNA.

There were concerns in India that an Internet slowdown could affect trading patterns at the country's two major exchanges, the National Stock Exchange (NSE) in Delhi and the SENSEX exchange in Bombay.

Rajesh Chharia, president of India's Internet Service Providers' Association, explained that some firms were trying to reroute via Pacific cables and that companies serving the eastern US and the UK were worst affected, AP added.

Besides the Internet, the outage caused major disruption to television and phone services, creating chaos for the UAE's public and private sectors.

The Du internal memo, obtained by CNN, called the situation in Dubai "critical" and stated that the cable's operators did not know when services would be restored.

"This will have a major impact on our voice and Internet service for all the customers," the memo stated. "The network operation team are working with our suppliers overseas to resolve this as soon as possible."

The outage led to a rapid collapse of a wide range of public services in a country which proudly promotes itself as technological pioneer.

Sources from Emirates Airlines confirmed to CNN Arabic that the outage did not affect its flight schedules -- a statement which assured hundreds of travelers worried after rumors about the possibility of rescheduled flights due to the faults.

However, Dnata, a government group in charge of providing air travel services in the Middle East and ground handling services at Dubai International Airport, acknowledged facing problems because of the outage, sources from its technical department confirmed to CNN Arabic.

The outage heavily crippled Dubai's business section, which is heavily reliant on electronic means for billions of dollars' worth of transactions daily.

Wadah Tahah, the business strategies and development manager for state-owned construction company EMAAR, told CNN Arabic that it was fortunate the outage started Wednesday, when there had been only moderate activity in the UAE markets. He said that softened the blow to business interests.

But Tahah warned that if the outage continued, "such a situation could create problems between brokers, companies, and investors due to loss of control."

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/01/3...index.html

[Richard]

Third undersea Internet cable cut in Mideast

CNN) -- An undersea cable carrying Internet traffic was cut off the Persian Gulf emirate of Dubai, officials said Friday, the third loss of a line carrying Internet and telephone traffic in three days.

Dubai has been hit hard by an Internet outage apparently caused by a cut undersea cable.

Ships have been dispatched to repair two undersea cables damaged on Wednesday off Egypt.

The ships were expected to reach the site of the break on Tuesday with repairs completed by February 12, according to a press release from FLAG Telecom, which owns one of the cables.

Stephan Beckert, an analyst with TeleGeography, a research company that consults on global Internet issues, said those cables were likely damaged by ships' anchors.

The loss of the two Mediterranean cables -- FLAG Telecom's FLAG Europe-Asia cable and SeaMeWe-4, a cable owned by a consortium of more than a dozen telecommunications companies -- has snarled Internet and phone traffic from Egypt to India.

Officials said Friday it was unclear what caused the damage to FLAG's FALCON cable about 50 kilometers off Dubai. A repair ship was en route, FLAG said.

Eric Schoonover, a senior analyst with TeleGeography, said the FALCON cable is designed on a "ring system," taking it on a circuit around the Persian Gulf and enabling traffic to be more easily routed around damage.

Schoonover said the two cables damaged Wednesday collectively account for as much as three-quarters of the international communications between Europe and the Middle East, so their loss had a much bigger effect.

Without the use of the FLAG Europe-Asia cable and SeaMeWe-4, some carriers were forced to reroute their European traffic around the globe, which could cause delays, Beckert said.

Other carriers could use SeaMeWe-3, an older cable that remained the only direct connection from Europe to the Middle East and Asia. Because this cable is older, it has a smaller capacity than the two damaged cables, Beckert said.

Still, Beckert stressed that although the problem created a "big pain" for many of carriers, it did not compare to the several months of disruption in East Asia in 2006 after an earthquake damaged seven undersea cables near Taiwan.

TeleGeography Research Director Alan Mauldin said new cables planned to link Europe with Egypt should provide enough backup to prevent most similar problems in the future.

Schoonover said a similar Internet problem could not happen in the United States.

"We have all the content here," he said. "It's not going to be felt other than we won't get the BBC."

TeleGeography officials also said most traffic between the U.S., Canada and Mexico is carried over land, and there is a plentiful supply of undersea cables carrying traffic under the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

Meanwhile, Internet service was slow Friday in Dubai and Egypt, where online service was intermittent, but there was less demand because many businesses in those countries aren't open on Fridays.

Service providers in Egypt said they hoped to have improved capacity by Sunday.

Web surfers in India were experiencing a marked improvement in service, though graphic- or video-heavy sites were still taking longer to load.

Most of the major Internet service providers in India, like Reliance and VSNL, were starting to use backup lines Friday, allowing service to slowly come back, said Rajesh Chharia, president of the Internet Services Providers Association of India.

The Indian ISPs were still alerting customers to slowdowns over the next few days with service quality delays of 50 percent to 60 percent, he said.

The Internet slowdowns had no effect on trading at the country's two main stock exchanges, the SENSEX and the NSE, because they aren't dependent on the downed cables, Chharia said.

Individual Web users were still feeling the effects.

Madhu Vohra, who lives in the city of Noida on the outskirts of Delhi, said she uses Internet phone service Skype to call her son in the United States, but she hasn't been able to reach him since the slowdown.

"We keep trying for a long time and the message comes up, 'This page can't display,' so finally we just turn the computer off and give up," Vohra said.

Internet cafes typically full of teenaged gamers are nearly empty with speeds still frustratingly slow.

"I felt like beating the ... modem, throwing it away, because we compete on the Internet and it feels really bad," said Aman Khurana, 13.

State-owned Dubai telecom provider Du and Kuwait's Ministry of Communications estimated Thursday that the problems might take two weeks to fix.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/02/0...index.html

[arejay]

I think something is up over there, because the internet is a way for information to move quick, now it cant, and this current map of earthquakes have a bunch of 3+ that just happened in the past 24hours

[Richard]

Real Time World Internet Status

[Avatar]

Third undersea Internet cable cut in Mideast

CNN) -- An undersea cable carrying Internet traffic was cut off the Persian Gulf emirate of Dubai, officials said Friday, the third loss of a line carrying Internet and telephone traffic in three days.

Dubai has been hit hard by an Internet outage apparently caused by a cut undersea cable.

Ships have been dispatched to repair two undersea cables damaged on Wednesday off Egypt.

The ships were expected to reach the site of the break on Tuesday with repairs completed by February 12, according to a press release from FLAG Telecom, which owns one of the cables.

Stephan Beckert, an analyst with TeleGeography, a research company that consults on global Internet issues, said those cables were likely damaged by ships' anchors.

The loss of the two Mediterranean cables -- FLAG Telecom's FLAG Europe-Asia cable and SeaMeWe-4, a cable owned by a consortium of more than a dozen telecommunications companies -- has snarled Internet and phone traffic from Egypt to India.

Officials said Friday it was unclear what caused the damage to FLAG's FALCON cable about 50 kilometers off Dubai. A repair ship was en route, FLAG said.

Eric Schoonover, a senior analyst with TeleGeography, said the FALCON cable is designed on a "ring system," taking it on a circuit around the Persian Gulf and enabling traffic to be more easily routed around damage.

Schoonover said the two cables damaged Wednesday collectively account for as much as three-quarters of the international communications between Europe and the Middle East, so their loss had a much bigger effect.

Without the use of the FLAG Europe-Asia cable and SeaMeWe-4, some carriers were forced to reroute their European traffic around the globe, which could cause delays, Beckert said.

Other carriers could use SeaMeWe-3, an older cable that remained the only direct connection from Europe to the Middle East and Asia. Because this cable is older, it has a smaller capacity than the two damaged cables, Beckert said.

Still, Beckert stressed that although the problem created a "big pain" for many of carriers, it did not compare to the several months of disruption in East Asia in 2006 after an earthquake damaged seven undersea cables near Taiwan.

TeleGeography Research Director Alan Mauldin said new cables planned to link Europe with Egypt should provide enough backup to prevent most similar problems in the future.

Schoonover said a similar Internet problem could not happen in the United States.

"We have all the content here," he said. "It's not going to be felt other than we won't get the BBC."

TeleGeography officials also said most traffic between the U.S., Canada and Mexico is carried over land, and there is a plentiful supply of undersea cables carrying traffic under the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

Meanwhile, Internet service was slow Friday in Dubai and Egypt, where online service was intermittent, but there was less demand because many businesses in those countries aren't open on Fridays.

Service providers in Egypt said they hoped to have improved capacity by Sunday.

Web surfers in India were experiencing a marked improvement in service, though graphic- or video-heavy sites were still taking longer to load.

Most of the major Internet service providers in India, like Reliance and VSNL, were starting to use backup lines Friday, allowing service to slowly come back, said Rajesh Chharia, president of the Internet Services Providers Association of India.

The Indian ISPs were still alerting customers to slowdowns over the next few days with service quality delays of 50 percent to 60 percent, he said.

The Internet slowdowns had no effect on trading at the country's two main stock exchanges, the SENSEX and the NSE, because they aren't dependent on the downed cables, Chharia said.

Individual Web users were still feeling the effects.

Madhu Vohra, who lives in the city of Noida on the outskirts of Delhi, said she uses Internet phone service Skype to call her son in the United States, but she hasn't been able to reach him since the slowdown.

"We keep trying for a long time and the message comes up, 'This page can't display,' so finally we just turn the computer off and give up," Vohra said.

Internet cafes typically full of teenaged gamers are nearly empty with speeds still frustratingly slow.

"I felt like beating the ... modem, throwing it away, because we compete on the Internet and it feels really bad," said Aman Khurana, 13.

State-owned Dubai telecom provider Du and Kuwait's Ministry of Communications estimated Thursday that the problems might take two weeks to fix.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/02/0...index.html

Richard, what do you think was the cause of the Internet Cables being cut? Could it have been the Romanovs, who want a Russian NWO and a Russian World Government?

[Richard]

I’m not sure what is going on yet but here is another interesting story I came across.

The “No Internet in Iran” Story is Bullcrap, but that Didn’t Stop 17 People from Submitting it

cryptogon.com

February 4, 2008

I don’t expect people to know much about computers, but the story about Iran having no Internet access is complete nonsense.

It scares the living crap out of me that so many Cryptogon readers are propagating this nonsense without even trying to verify whether or not the story is true. (In fairness, one Cryptogon reader who submitted it later wrote that, by the same measure, Florida had no Internet services. HAHA)

The page that all of you are submitting monitors one router, which happens to be down, at the Iran University of Science and Technology. Somehow, through the magic bullsh*t amplification powers of the Intertubes, the fact that one router is down at an Iranian university has snowballed into "Iran is off the air."

Oh really?

Why not check out the Iran University of Science and Technology’s homepage?

http://www.iust.ac.ir
IP: 194.225.230.89
Machine Location: Tehran, Iran

How about the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs?

http://www.mfa.gov.ir
IP: 217.172.99.41
Machine Location: Tehran, Iran

How about the Central Bank of The Islamic Republic of Iran?

http://www.cbi.ir
IP: 217.218.174.178
Machine Location: Tehran, Iran

Hint: Don’t believe everything you read on Reddit and Slashdot.

See also: http://www-wanmon.slac.stanford.edu/cgi-...able.pl?fi
le=throughput&by=by-site&size=100&tick=monthly&from=EDU.SLAC ...
 
http://uruknet.info/?p=m40833&hd=&size=1&l=e

[Polly]

That article is good to add here.  I know how things can quickly be blown out of proportion in a matter of hours on the Internet.  It will happen again and again.

[Lion]

I thought of that too - that even if the 'middle east' was cut off from the internet, that its all just where you're point of view sits.

For example, the cable cuts (whatever the reason) only would have broken connection 'between' the middle east and west - not taken the middle east 'offline'. Has anyone thought that the middle east would see the 'cut' as the West not having internet access? Like the glass of water is half empty or half full - Depends how you perceive it.

The cut doesn't bring down the internal infrastructure of the networks in Iran / Middle East, its more so of a separation of East vs West.

To us - they lost internet, to them, we have lost internet. Either way, its the propaganda machine at work. This does not mean to say that the separation would not be a form of tactical move to prevent east information getting out into the west if sh*t were to hit the fan.

I recall when I worked for an Internet Security Firm, a Trojan Horse by the name 'QAZ' was very cleverly written - even news articles stating it was developed by Microsoft based programming, something that the 'average' script kiddie never used, as they were more into the Borland Delphi or Visual Basic styles of programming. Analysing the trojan, the IP address that the data was being sent to was a supposed 'Chinese' hacker, yet when doing analysis of the trace route (path of traffic to hacker) it was interesting to note that all the traffic from Western Australia would route through the USA before it went anywhere else through a small bottleneck ...located at Redmond! (Home of Microsoft). What I found interesting is that the data never actually furthered from the US borders, it never left american soil, it never reached China. It was propaganda. What was also interesting is that we developed traffic filtering software - it is entirely possible that the data going through Microsoft servers was 'sniffed' and collected. There was a small conspiracy on technology forums that the QAZ trojan originated from pirated Windows 2000 operating systems only, however was never proven.

What was even MORE interesting, is that Microsoft was 'hacked' by the trojan horse itself - or so it was reported. Information about Windows ME and future code was supposedly stolen. BS.

The internet is not a 'web' as its supposed to be. Its strategically designed for filtering, control, and of course, have systems designed to contain anything that would not be in the interest of the West. I also think that just like 'War of the World' newscast by Orson Wells in 1938, that this is a 'test' to see if such control is possible in the case of an emergency.

[GertrudaRose]

Thanks, Lion, for pointing out the obvious.  I thought I was missing something.  The Internet is not down in all of those countries - at most there are delays with satellite transmissions being bogged down with rerouted traffic from the disabled underwater cables.

I was also interested in your virus story.  Years ago, when the first viruses began to appear and the virus detectors soon after, I happened upon a virus detector that was generating its own alerts in an attempt to coerce users into buying a new upgrade.  This practice seems to be continuing with free virus detectors that find thousands of problems on your computer and then offer their latest package deal.  What a bargain!

Other interesting computer topics include: what did Gates agree to do in exchange for the dismissal of government penalties for monopolizing, how MS continues to put the bugs/hooks in their operating system to force developers to agree to develop software only for Windows, and the strange appearances and governemnt affiliations of Gates now that he has "retired".

[Lion]

GertrudaRose,

Yes I am familiar with the virus/trojan/spyware scanners detecting 'false positives'. It was common for our competition to use such tactics, however inadvertently, we also had similar problems with false positives as well (Signature of files being too generic which flagged regular files) - however they were unintentional and solutions were provided free of charge. We strived on Customer Service - I would write pages and pages worth of e-mails to clients who had problems, even to people who hadn't even purchased the software (Made a lot of good friends that way too - still friends to this day).

Your interpretation of Bill Gates suspicious behaviour is quote founded.

Although 'bugs' is a COMMON tactic used by software developers to continuously get repeating clients to stay 'hooked' on the software, and with the intention of the 'upgrade' to co-erce them to purchase the 'new' programs that are also released. Its a way of making Software a consumable product.

I recall discovering some code (Can't actually remember if it was Code in an executable or an actual file itself) however it was called 'NSAkey'. Trying to find the reason for this 'NSAkey' was a task no one managed to track down (others also found it too). Of course, it was speculated that the NSA had a hand in the Operating System Security (Windows 2000) - allowing backdoor access if needed by the NSA.

Then now of course you have the "official" NSA involvement of the Windows Vista operating system - under the guise of 'Windows Security' although more than likely - backdoor access.

I'm sort of glad the general consensus of the Vista operating system is a flop. I like my XP Service Pack 2. Although others do prefer the Windows 98 Second Edition. Each to their own :)