According to CNN It appears that “large swathes of Asia, the Middle East, and north Africa had their high-technology services crippled Thursday following a widespread Internet failure.” The story doesn’t seem to be making a lot of press on most of the national media outlets at the moment aside from the AP. International sites such as  the BBC and The Telegraph.

Users from Egypt to Bangladesh are affected by the outage and even the wealthiest of nations could not escape. The U.A.E could not escape the outage as Dubai saw their stock exchange traffic come to a crawl.

The problem is said to be caused by cables, which lie off the coast of Egypt under the Mediterranean Sea that could take a week or more to fix. That could be a problem as India is said to have lost half of its bandwidth which makes a customer-service call to any number of U.S. companies even more frustrating than usual. Outsourced customer-service call centers are feeling the slowdown and working on slowed systems.

Middle Eastern Web

Luckily the Western areas of Europe and the U.S. and Japan have not been affected. It’s hard to predict what would be worse, the U.S. stock market having to take a day off or no Xbox Live. A Internet outage in the U.S. would cripple the country more so than any physical terrorist attack. Losing network capabilities would shut down  airports, businesses, and even hospitals would be affected. Cell phones would be routed off satellites only and with most everyone receiving their news from the Internet or cable television the problem would only escalate. This country has become more dependent on cables that connect us electronically than we are on foreign oil. Take away those connections for a week and the economy would lose millions if not billions.

Web Cables

 Of course, this is all my own speculation and I’m sorry I can’t provide links or other sites to back up my theories, but it is what I believe. It’s the technology you take for granted that affects you the most when it gets shut down. So, here’s to a web-dependent future, just make sure to keep some stamps and that print newspaper subscription going just in case.


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