this is not a fully correct picture, It has not shown Bangladesh outage. Bangladesh is also suffering badly.

Dumb question maybe, but what is ht possibility for Egypt and the rest to route its traffic via India, Singapore, USA to Europe or south around South Africa?

India and Africa and South America seem to be the bottleneck in routing traffic around the world at the moment

You can cross the north Pacific and North Atlantic on multiple routes. But you can't reach India, Middle East, Africa and South America on multiple routes.

(BTW Nice picture of the TYCO Responder Cable ship on my blog)

I don't think this is correct. You most certainly can reach India via multiple routes. In particular, India has routes heading both East and West. This is why the Taiwan quakes ( http://www.renesys.com/blog/2007/01/the_shape_of_disaster_on_the_n.shtml )in late 2006 were a problem for India—it got most of its connectivity heading East. Now we find that it currently gets a decent-sized chunk heading West, too.

Even if it were possible for Egypt and others to route all their European-bound traffic heading East through India, Singapore, then Japan, the US, then Europe, that route would be horrendous. It would have, at a minimum, with no congestion, you're looking at many hundreds of milliseconds of latency (possibly as much as a second if you take sub-optimal paths and encounter any congestion anywhere, which you almost certainly would by shoving all that traffic in a direction it's not used to travelling).

More importantly, it would also be hideously expensive. Even at the very high rates that people already pay for Internet transit in the Middle East, it would not be possible for carriers to pay for all of the undersea cable (three oceans need to be crossed at a minimum) and all of the other capacity used without significantly raising prices. probably by a factor of 10 or so. It's not clear the market needs Skype to work that badly. :-)

GET IT FIXED i dont care about the reason cause its dumb just get it fixed fast

Thanks to all for the great comments, both in this blog and privately. I just updated the posting to include Bangladesh, which was accidentally left out.

Note that all of the countries in the region were impacted to some extent. We focused on those with the highest number or highest percentage of outages, assuming we could correlate their outages with the cable break.

Next up, a look at the providers in the region and how they fared.

The seamewe4 website shows quite a few countries connected. Out here in Sri Lanka there is quite a bit of intermittent services. Particularly with the South East Asia region.

In Saudi Arabia, there was no complete outage but browsing and other services were very slow and pings to US based server which usually shows round-trip 280 ms at the most were showing 800 to 1600 milli-seconds. Email servers hosted within Saudi Arabia have been unreachable from outside world for sometime the first day. Since yesterday our Jeddah upstream have managed to re-route the traffic through other carriers. Now Internet is operating normally. Thanks for the info renesys

VSNL has restored Internet Services within
24 Hours Following Egypt Submarine Cable Breaks. Our
network and operations teams across three continents united to execute an ambitious recovery plan in 24 hours. Our internet backbone around the world and our cable assets in India, Asia and Pacific allowed us to survive this double cable failure as well as deploy enough capacity eastward across the Pacific for the internet to reach North America and Europe.

Obviously the latency to reach Europe and North America is greater than usual but all packets are routed.

i need full details on impact on both U.A.E and on Qatar?
who owns that cables ? who will pay for repair?
alaa

You show Iran as not affected. Are you sure about this? Internet Traffic Report shows Iran completely down. Is it by hazard, or is your map incorrect?

A clarification is in order: we do not show Iran as unaffected--we show it as not among the worst-affected countries.

Our methods of collecting data are completely different (and significantly broader) than the Internet Traffic Report. They pick some IP addresses in a country and ping them. If those particular addresses are reachable, they record those data. This is useful for showing whether those particular IP addresses are reachable but may or may not indicate much about other IP addresses nearby or in the same country.

We collect full tables of internet routes from 250+ full routers all over the planet and integrate those data. When a route is withdrawn (i.e.: unreachable) worldwide we can pretty much guarantee that no traffic can get to any machine in that whole network. On the other hand, routes can stay up but the traffic may not be able to pass. This isn't a very common situation, but it can happen. So even collecting the routing data doesn't prove everything.

In other words, our methods are broader than active measurement techniques like pinging individual IP addresses, but the two methods are also complementary.

There's been a lot written recently about Iran being completely off the air. They weren't. If people keep speculating about this subject often enough, we'll write it up.

Thanks for the good info

Maybe it sounds silly but i saw one of the cable under water in egypt when i was diving at a spot downwards to sudan. The cable was spinned around a coral block about 2 times and looked like it could break every second (the cable)

It was about 20 centimeters thick

Nice coverage of the events Renesys.

Raindeer: Nice pictures :) also check out the ICPC site (http://www.iscpc.org/information/Cableships_Page.htm) where there are quite a selection of cable ships.

Anyone know if Turkey is also being affected?

New cable system: I-ME-WE to be operated by STC.

The Chief Executive Officer at the Saudi Telecom Company (STC) announced that the company has signed an agreement with a consortium of major international companies to construct a submarine cable system, I-ME-WE, linking Europe to the Indian subcontinent via the Gulf, Arab News reported.

more: http://www.menafn.com/qn_news_story_s.asp?StoryId=1093184496

Oh WOW! Thanks for the great info!!