Single point of failure

Kenneth Hynek • 31st Jan 2008 • The Sciences, The Interwebs, World News
Alexandria, Asia, Australia, DDOS, Egypt, Germany, India, Internet, Italy, Middle East, Palermo, Saudi Arabia, the Mediterranean

Tens of millions of Internet users across the Middle East and Asia have been left without access to the web after a technical fault cut millions of connections.

The outage, which is being blamed on a fault in a single undersea cable, has severely restricted internet access in countries including India, Egypt and Saudi Arabia and left huge numbers of people struggling to get online.

Observers say that the digital blackout first struck yesterday morning, with the Egypt’s communications ministry suggesting it was caused by a cut in a major internet pipeline linking it to Europe.

The line in question runs under the Mediterranean, from Palermo in Italy to Alexandria in Egypt. It is not clear what caused the break. The cable is one of only a handful of connections, and part of the world’s longest undersea cable, 24,500 miles long, running from Germany, through the Middle East and India before terminating in Australia and Japan.

Oops.

On the plus side, though, I’m willing to bet that incidences of DDOS attacks launched against anti-jihad websites went down a point or two.

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