CAIRO, Egypt - Internet outages disrupted business and personal usage across a wide section of the Middle East on Wednesday following the damage of two undersea cables in the Mediterranean, government officials and Internet service providers said.
In Cairo, the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology said damage to the international communications cables Flag and Seamewe 4 caused a partial disruption of Internet services and other telecommunications across much of Egypt.
The severed lines account for 75 percent of the capacity connecting Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries to Europe, said TeleGeography, an American research group that tracks global submarine cables.
Emergency teams were trying to quickly find alternative routes, including satellite connections, to end the disruptions, Minister Tariq Kamel said.
"Solving this could take days," explained a telecommunications expert at the Egyptian communications ministry Rafaat Hindy.
It would take "a few days, up to one week, before submarine cable operators deploy ships to bring the cables up and fix the fault," said Eric Schoonover, senior research analyst at TeleGeography.
It was not clear what caused the damage to the cable, though it is suspected that an illegally or improperly anchored ship was the culprit. Cables are damaged often, but Schoonover believes this was the first time two undersea cables near each other were cut at the same time.
Phone lines in Egypt still work, indicating "network operators in the area are rerouting traffic through emergency channels," Schoonover said. He said alternate paths include going "around India and back through Asia to the U.S."
Internet service also was disrupted in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, which markets itself as a top Middle East business and luxury tourist hub. Both Internet service providers said international telephone service also was affected.
One of the ISPs, DU, was completely down in the morning. Browsing remained very slow even after DU restored Internet service by the afternoon.
A DU customer care official, who identified himself as "Hamed" because he was not authorized to talk to the media, said the cable was cut between Alexandria, Egypt, and Palermo, Italy.
Although he could not describe the technical fault, Hamed said engineers contracted by DU were working to solve the problem. By early afternoon, the service was flooded with complaints and had found alternative routes, Hamed said, but "there is slowness while browsing on the Internet."
There was no total outage in Kuwait, but service was interrupted Tuesday and Wednesday. In an email sent Wednesday, the Gulfnet International Co. apologized to its customers for the "degraded performance in Internet browsing."
In Saudi Arabia, some users said the Internet was functioning fine, but others said it was slow or totally down.
Users in Bahrain and Qatar also complained that the Internet was slow.
