The mystery of the world's biggest net outage solved?

Conspiracy theorists, you were right. Apparently.

The biggest net outage ever recorded was the work of two wayward ships off the coast of Egypt earlier this year. The news comes from Dubai, where the ships were briefly impounded in recent days and two men could face trial, VNUnet reports. This comes after Egypt's Communication Ministry informed us in early February that no ship was capable of knocking out the underwater cables, triggering vexing net outages from the Middle East to India.

The new version of events is that two ships -- one Korean-owned, the other Iraqi -- travelling in a forbidden zone, dropped anchor and dragged it across the sea bottom, snapping the lines.

Reliance Globalcom, which owns the cables, was able to piece together this scenario, using satellite photos to identify the culprits, essentially sinking the official Egyptian version of events.