Arrr sea pirates be cutting your cables!

[fuser]

So this AM two under sea cables are cut and a third damaged in the Mediterranean. Both cables were damaged in between Sicily and Tunisia. The two effected systems are SEA-ME-WE 3 and SEA-ME-WE 4. There's some maps there of the system.

France Telecom has an awesome video up on how an undersea cable event happens and how repairs are done. Causes could range from undersea earthquake, fishing trawler nets, ship anchors, or underpants gnomes.

Press release

France Telecom observed today that 3 major underwater cables were cut: “Sea Me We 4” at 7:28am, “Sea Me We3” at 7:33am and FLAG at 8:06am.
The causes of the cut, which is located in the Mediterranean between Sicily and Tunisia, on sections linking Sicily to Egypt, remain unclear.

Most of the B to B traffic between Europe and Asia is rerouted through the USA.
Traffic from Europe to Algeria and Tunisia is not affected, but traffic from Europe to the Near East and Asia is interrupted to a greater or lesser extent (see country list below).
Part of the internet traffic towards Réunion is affected as well as 50% towards Jordan.
A first appraisal at 7:44 am UTC gave an estimate of the following impact on the voice traffic (in percentage of out of service capacity):
-    Saudi Arabia: 55% out of service
-    Djibouti: 71% out of service
-    Egypt: 52% out of service
-    United Arab Emirates: 68% out of service
-    India: 82% out of service
-    Lebanon: 16% out of service
-    Malaysia: 42% out of service
-    Maldives: 100% out of service
-    Pakistan: 51% out of service
-    Qatar: 73% out of service
-    Syria: 36% out of service
-    Taiwan: 39% out of service
-    Yemen: 38% out of service
-    Zambia: 62% out of service

France Telecom immediately alerted one of the two maintenance boats based in the Mediterranean area, the “Raymond Croze”. This France Telecom Marine cable ship based at Seyne-sur-Mer has received its mobilization order early this afternoon and will cast off tonight at 3:00 am with 20 kilometers spare cable on board. It should be on location on Monday morning for a relief mission.
Priority will be given to the recovery of the Sea Me We4 cable, then on the Sea Me We3.
By December 25th, Sea Me We4 could be operating. By December 31st, the situation should be back to normal.

It has had a big impact here too as the traffic will now be rerouting across other points (say the US) to push traffic around the broken huge chunk of the network.

Internet traffic also has been hit by the incident, according to Danny McPherson, chief security officer with Arbor Networks. His company's sensors reported that between 3,000 and 5,000 Internet routes in the region were off-line early Friday morning. These routes are the Internet's equivalent of dialing prefixes, meaning that computers that used them would be completely unreachable until service was restored.

"It's significant that it was lost," he said "For them it was in the middle of a business day on Friday."

A large number of these came back on-line around 17:00 UTC, McPherson said. Most likely this happened after ISPs (Internet service providers) that had been knocked off-line had found alternate routes for their traffic.

It's hard to estimate how many Internet users were affected by the cut, but the Internet has a total of close to 300,000 such routes, he said.

[JWIV]

This isn't the first time those cables were cut.  Last time, there was a nice little trifecta in a short period of time leading to the tin foil hat brigrade invading NANOG and declaring that the US was obviously about to invade the entire fucking middle east and had cut the cables as a deliberate first strike to isolate communications. 

Much like anything said by Raph, the media picked up on this like flies on shit and the blogosphere seen became overrun with FUD and self-proclaimed experts.

[bhodi]

This isn't the first time those cables were cut.  Last time, there was a nice little trifecta in a short period of time leading to the tin foil hat brigrade invading NANOG and declaring that the US was obviously about to invade the entire fucking middle east and had cut the cables as a deliberate first strike to isolate communications. 

Much like anything said by Raph, the media picked up on this like flies on shit and the blogosphere seen became overrun with FUD and self-proclaimed experts.

Exactly what I was thinking. The first word that popped into my head after reading this topic was again?!

On land, the most hated enemy of the internet is the backhoe. In the sea, it's the anchor.

[Fabricated]

This isn't the first time those cables were cut.  Last time, there was a nice little trifecta in a short period of time leading to the tin foil hat brigrade invading NANOG and declaring that the US was obviously about to invade the entire fucking middle east and had cut the cables as a deliberate first strike to isolate communications. 

Much like anything said by Raph, the media picked up on this like flies on shit and the blogosphere seen became overrun with FUD and self-proclaimed experts.

Exactly what I was thinking. The first word that popped into my head after reading this topic was again?!

On land, the most hated enemy of the internet is the backhoe. In the sea, it's the anchor.

My Cisco instructor and professor friend of said it in one of my classes a while back, "There is nothing more dangerous than an idiot with a backhoe and a good idea."

[FatuousTwat]

What the fuck are you guys talking about? It's obviously a KRAKEN. Or perhaps some type of giant shark with metal teeth genetically altered by the military!

[Phildo]

[Cadaverine]

[Teleku]

[Righ]

[Azaroth]

That made me lol.

[Evildrider]

[Lakov_Sanite]

Finally, a job for...