• by Tameka Kee , February 6, 2008

For the fourth time in roughly seven days, an undersea cable that provides voice and Web service to countries in the Middle East and Asia has been damaged, sparking massive disruptions in Internet service and degradation of call quality.

On Jan. 30 two cables off the northern coast of Egypt were snapped, cut or otherwise damaged, causing Internet service to slow to a crawl in countries like Egypt, Bangladesh, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and India. Then on Friday, another company reported that a third cable had been damaged off the coast of UAE.

At one point bandwidth was down by some 60% in India, and outages caused delays on Dubai's stock exchange. TeleGeography, a U.S.-based research firm that tracks the status of submarine cables worldwide, said that the damage reduced the amount of available capacity between the Middle East and Europe by 75%.

According to ArabianBusiness.com, this fourth cable belonged to Qatar Telecom, but unlike the three previous incidents, the company has said that it is related "to the power system and not the results of a ship's anchor cutting the cable, as is thought to be the case in the other three incidents."

The day after the first outages, it was widely reported that some sea vessel was at fault. But just two days later, Egypt's Ministry of Communications issued a statement saying that there were no ships present in the area, as per marine transport committee findings. Yesterday, the lack of a concrete explanation for the first group of damages combined with news of the newest cable mishap and caused the blogosphere to explode with conspiracy theories and suspicions about the accidental nature of the incidents.

Switched, an AOL News property, ran the headline "Fourth Undersea Cable Cut, Stoking Suspicions of Intent" at about 2 p.m., while Engadget, another AOL property (under the Weblogs brand) lead with "Fourth undersea cable cut near UAE, suspicions rise."

Social news hounds pushed the Engadget story to the front page of Digg, a popular social news site--and left more than a 100 comments, ranging from snarky quips calling out the conspiracy theorists, to reader tbenathan's impassioned response: "This is no longer suspicious--this is an act of Modern Warfare. This better be front page news in all the international papers, or else they're complicit."

While CNET Blogger Charles Cooper tries to be objective in his own article, even he concedes that there may be some validity to the growing suspicion. "Three undersea fiber-optic cables get cut in just one week, and the conspiracy crowd is already convinced this is the prelude to World War III--or at the very least, a United States bombing assault on Iran," Cooper wrote. "Truth be told, I'm not ready to dismiss their paranoia completely. Yes, they are nuts but they're not entirely crazy."

All conspiracy theories aside, these latest cable problems are indicative of the larger issue of how vulnerable the global infrastructure that powers the Web actually is. "The world only seems flat because it's being held that way by what some believe is a fairly fragile infrastructure," said Jonah Stein, managing director of Alchemist Media. "If 75% of the Internet traffic into two continents can be interrupted with a few well-placed anchors, then the infrastructure is much more fragile than we think."