Bad news for fringsters in Middle East and South Asia.

Severe internet outages in the Middle East and South Asia where reported on Wednesday after two submarine cables in the Mediterranean where damaged. The effected cables Flag and Seamewe 4 will reportedly take some time to be repaired, and services are currently being routed through an emergency cable. There is however not enough bandwidth available on the cable for everyone and users are being asked to stop downloading large files like video’s until the cables are repaired, to allow businesses to continue trading. [AP]
The countries mostly affected by the outage are Egypt, India, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Yemen, Qatar and Bahrain.

According to sources more than 70% of internet users are affected. [MyBroadband]

Update: A third submarine cable has also now been damaged. According to the BBC the Falcon cable owned by Flag Telecom has now also been cut. The cause of the damage is not yet known. It is hoped that the service will be operational within a week, repair ships have been deployed and will start fixing the cables within the week. Countries affected by the latest cable break include: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Yemen, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, India.

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