I just dugg an article linked from engadget. It seems that all of Iran, and much of Asia, have lost their Internet connection. Look at the real time Internet Traffic Report for Asia. Iran has been at 0% response time, and 100% packet loss for days.
From the engadget article: “For the fourth time in a week, an undersea communications cable has apparently been cut (or “failed due to a power outage,” as some sources suggest), and while no official reports of subversion have surfaced just yet, things are beginning to get suspicious.” The New York Times first reported these outages back on January 31st.
An article in the Khaleej Times reports that there have actually been FIVE major undersea cable outages since January 23rd, all which can likely be attributed to ships dragging anchors while fighting rough weather.
So here’s one small thing that bugs me – the reality is that undersea cables don’t break that often, they do break often I guess – see below. If you look at the Wikipedia entry for undersea cable, there have been a few accidental breaks in the past few years, but only a few over many years, or at least as noted in this article.
Therefore, it seems a logical conclusion is that no huge multinational conglomerate telco, like Flag Telecom, would spend hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, over 17 years, to install a massive global communications network to the Middle East, and install cable in a manner that would easily break, or be snagged. Undersea cable is simply too expensive to install, and even more expensive to repair. The likelihood of five ships dragging anchors into five cables in five days seems slim, doesn’t it? Here’s a link on Alacatel’s site that shows how they BURY undersea cable when they install it.
Cable piracy is a new phenomenon, according to the International Cablemakers Federation. There have been reports of undersea cables being “un-installed” in the South China Sea. In Vietnam young thieves have caused millions of dollars in damage to communications networks while stealing telecom cable for scrap.
On a creepier note, Ziff Davis reported way back in 2001 that spy agencies had shifted their intelligence gathering efforts to these underseas networks. One person at ilovebonnie.net points out that there are interesting disparities in the geography in reports regarding the cable outages.
Whatever happens here, it just reminds me that the Internet that we all take for granted now could be removed from our lives very quickly, and succinctly, with must a few snips, and a few power switches thrown. The pirates in Asia simply took cable, and caused weeks long outages. No technical experience required for this position.
Half a continent and a few countries were just bounced off the Internet altogether, for reasons yet to be determined, in just a few days time. I am certain that the estimated 10,000,000 internet users in Iran, and the governing powers of all nations determining their fate, are now fully aware of the suddenness of this outage, and its potentially larger long term consequences.
Update: ABC NEWS has come out with their theory on this, and it seems to make the most sense. Outages in undersea cables are fairly common it seems. The reason that we don’t hear about them more often is that there is a large amount of redundancy in data networks, and the breaks don’t usually cause any delay in traffic, let alone outages here in the U.S.
Internet traffic in the middle east is routed through several single cables, each susceptible to total failure, unlike most of the remainder of the Internet. Could this whole problem be poor network design, and a weaker Internet in a developing area of the world? Time will tell.
