Undersea Internet Cables Break in Middle East

| Commentary | The exact cause of a major Internet outage in the Middle East this week won't be known for a few more days. Two fiber optic cables off the cost of Egypt broke unexpectedly, affecting transcontinental network traffic in the region and as far away as India. Oddly, less than 48 hours after the original incident, a third undersea Internet cable far away in the Persian Gulf also failed, a break yet to be assessed.

Undersea network cables are usually not buried underground but instead lay exposed on the ocean floor (or in shallow trenches), where earthquakes, boat anchors, and other dangers both natural and man-made await. Fortunately in this case, enough Internet capacity existed on other international links to mitigate the outages. Look for an update next week on repairs.
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