India struggling to cope with Internet outages

NEW DELHI - Fallout spread Thursday from a cut in two undersea Internet cables off Egypt's coast, with India waking up to half of its bandwidth disrupted and widespread outages still hampering a wide swath of the Mideast.

Officials said it could take a week or more to fix the cables, in part because of bad weather. Officials in several countries were scrambling to reroute traffic to satellites and to other cables through Asia.

In all, users in India, Pakistan, Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Bahrain were affected. Israel was unaffected by the outages because its Internet traffic is connected to Europe through a different undersea cable, and Lebanon and Iraq were also operating normally.

The biggest impact to the rest of the world could come from the outages across India — where many U.S. companies outsource back-office operations including customer service call centers.
The outage also raised questions about the system's vulnerability. A Gulf analyst called it a "wake-up call" while an analyst in London cautioned that no one, including the West, was immune to such disruptions.

They could have a "massive impact on businesses," said Alex Burmaster, from Nielsen Online in London, and ordinary people "probably couldn't imagine" a life without the Internet.

Large-scale disruptions are rare but not unknown. East Asia suffered nearly two months of outages and slow service after an earthquake damaged undersea cables near Taiwan in December 2006. That repair operation also was hampered by bad weather.

So far, most governments in the region appeared to be operating normally, apparently because they had switched to backup satellite systems. However, the outages had caused slowdown in traffic on Dubai's stock exchange Wednesday.

In India, major outsourcing firms, such as Infosys and Wipro, and U.S. companies with significant back-office and research and development operations in India, such as IBM and Intel, said they were still trying to assess how their operations had been impacted, if at all.

But the president of the Internet Service Providers' Association of India, Rajesh Chharia, said companies that serve the East Coast of the United States and Britain had been badly hit.

"The companies that serve the (U.S.) East coast and the UK are worst affected. The delay is very bad in some cases," Chharia told The Associated Press. "They have to arrange backup plans or they have to accept the poor quality for the time being until the fiber is restored.

Chharia said some companies were rerouting their service through the Pacific route, bypassing the disrupted cables. He said roughly 50 percent of the country's bandwidth had been affected.

 • View Top Rated stories