Posted on 12/19/2008 3:37:18 PM PST by khnyny
Tech Central: er, something's happening
Millions of people across the Middle East and Asia have lost access to the internet after two undersea cables in the Mediterranean suffered severe damage.
Huge numbers in Egypt and India were left struggling to get online as a result of the outage, when the major internet pipeline between Egypt and Italy was cut.
Internet Service Providers (ISPs) throughout the region, including those in United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, also reported problems. International telephone calls, which have also been affected, are being rerouted to work around the problem.
Industry experts told The Times that two sub-sea cables went down just off Alexandra, causing the mass disruption. It happens to a single cable typically once a year, and companies have developed the fail-safe of redirecting traffic to a second cable should this occur.
“It is incredibly rare to experience a dual-break where both cables are down simultaneously,” said a spokesperson for Interoute, the internet networks company.
The Egyptian ministry said it will take “several days” for cables to be repaired and is trying to reroute Egypt’s internet connections.
Indian ISPs said their problems were due to the cable damage off Egypt. Speaking to reporters, Rajesh Chharia, president of the Internet Service Providers’ Association of India, said: "Information technology companies, software companies and call centres that provide online services to the UK or the US east coast are the worst affected."
(Excerpt) Read more at technology.timesonline.co.uk ...
Hmmmmmmm indeed.
Heh Heh Heh
So let’s all outsource our IT operations it India!
Somewhere CIOs are being asked difficult questions.
Is this recent? I remember this happened during the summer ....
Ditto your hmmmmm.
Stupid Gilligan
Yes, it’s recent and yes, it happened before.
Not a pr blem. Ever th ng is n rmal here.
terne servic is unimp ded.
This past summer’s outages involved areas in the Arab territories!
Again??
Didn’t this happen before, just a few months ago?
As somebody who lost their IT job to India in 2003 I say this is Karma.
For crying out loud! Isn’t that, like, the third time in as many years?
And this time the auxiliary cable broke too. Tell me that’s an accident.
The only question is cui bono? Pakistan? Have they acquired any specialized deep-sea submersibles?
Ping
Outsourcing is such BS. I have a buddy who worked for a global bank. They called him at 3 am all the time to get up and fix what some Indian programmer screw up in Mumbai. His CIO was an affirmative action hire. He left the bank eventually because it was like Dilbert on steroids or LSD.
Thank you fanfan and a special emailer for the pointing to this article.
!oot ,retupmoc ym htiw gnorw gnihtemos s’erehT
You too? My term date with my second to last employer was Jan 1, 2003. Doesn't seem to have worked for them. Lot of problems, lot of unbudgeted expenses. They've spent the past two years in Chapter 11 and it doesn't look like they are going to come out. The good news is, they've shrunk so much that outsourcing is no longer profitable for them and they've hired back some of my old staff to try to clean up the mess.
We better be careful though or the outsourcing apologists will be raving about how it was all our own fault and we were paid too much and how our ability to feed our families was just a part of the global economy and a fungible commodity, etc. etc. ad naus.
You are very welcome Cindy.
A Blessed Christmas to you and yours.
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