How a wayward ship off the coast of Egypt paralysed half the world

Call it "the mother of all outages". Two submarine cable networks a few miles off the coast of Egypt were snapped by a passing ship earlier this week, knocking out completely or seriously disrupting internet access and telecommunications service to vast portions of the Middle East and India. Repairing the line will take 12 to 15 days, Bloomberg is reporting.

The theory is that an anchor scraping along the floor of the sea snapped the lines, cutting access to tens of millions.  "It's a national disaster,'' Joseph Metry, network supervisor at Orascom Telecom Holding SAE, the biggest mobile phone company in the Middle East and North Africa, told Bloomberg. He said all Egyptian internet users have been affected.

The severed line has triggered a series of delays further down the line as telecoms providers look to re-route traffic through other unaffected networks. The internet is an incredibly resilient network with a series of redundancies built in should a fault arise, but there are drawbacks to this as well: when one crucial piece of the internet goes down, the strain is shifted to other points in the global network, creating bottlenecks.

This isn't the first incident of a fault in an underwater cable impacting millions. In December, 2006 a deep-sea earthquake at a point called the Luzon Strait off the coast of Taiwan played havoc with net connections across mainland China for weeks, and triggered disruptions as far afield as the United States. Last January, a report from Power and Interest News warned:

The "choke point" in the Luzon Strait and other potential points of failure in the worldwide telecommunications network are obvious causes of concern economically, but the outage raises geopolitical questions as well.