The question I have not seen posed yet. Who will benefit? Who will benefit of this outage? Who would benefit from sealing off Egypt and other countries in the Middle-East? The Chinese? Hardly. The Brazilians? Hardly. The Vietnamese? Doubtfully. The Finns? Doubtful too. Ok, I'm at a loss. Wonder if anyone can come up with brighter guesses?

well, if you wanted to put a tap on a communication line I should think an outage would be very useful for you - it would give you time to install the tap with no one noticing. Otherwise installing a tap would be an extremely slow process, and one which potentially could be detected.

I'm posting this from Dubai- near Media City/Internet City for those who are familiar. Certain sites seem to work pretty well- Fark for some reason loads very quickly. Other sites (including Slashdot) are about as fast as AOL in 1994. Speeds seem to not always correlate to usage levels; around noon it's usually not terrible but late at night browsing is almost impossible. Anyone else care to share their own observations?

The conspiracy theorists are coming out of the woodwork on this one. It's an anchor drag folks. The last thing any 'conspirator' wants is comms to be cut off. Quite the opposite in fact.

This isn't an analog line, genius. The traffic of interest is in the client/ tributary payload, so the logical place to put a tap is where the container terminates or where it is switched. that means a telecom data center, not the bottom of the ocean. Additionally you needen't "splice" into live media ( thereby causing noticeable loss of traffic and noticably increased signal attenuation afterwards) - telecom transmission technology allows switching to protection at speeds 50 milisec, which is not noticable to human hearing...anyway, the data of interest would be on an encrypted data, not voice channel. 80GB is a lot of voice traffic, to sort this out in realtime you'd need a pretty stout set of telecomm eqpt. Consider that a single voice channel is 64kbps, also the fact that voice traffic ( if going over tdm and not voip) is multiplexed into sdh most likely carried over dwdm/wdm. A single e1 ( 2 mb/s) carries up to 32 voice channels, there are 70 e1 worth of payload in an stm1 , which is 155 mb/sec. How are you going to monitor this many discrete ( and multiplexed, encoded ) signals at once? do you even realize how much traffic that is? don't forget that sizable portion of voice goes over data ntwks as voip, and you can have ip using bridged ethernet over sdh, ima over multiple e1, mpls, atm or directly on top of sdh ( short list, there are many more possibilties)... anyway, if you want to listen in, you'd better do it somewhere you can actually do something with that data. having said all that, i think this is a good low tech way to test their readiness....

An anchor drag accross two cables in the Mediterranean is quite plausible, but what about the third one off the coast of Dubai in less than a week? That's not even the same sea.

It might just be a cover up for incompetency. but I don't buy the three accidental anchor drags story.

There were similar outages due to supposedly broken cables a year (or two?) ago in the Indian ocean, which affected UAE Internet services. Those cables were dozens of kilometers apart too.