Fourth subsea cable break sparks conspiracy theories

Now after four breakages in just five days on different cables close by and serving the Middle East have caused severe disruption, a flurry of conspiracy theories are being expounded on the web and even in the more traditional media.

SEA-ME-WE 4 and FLAG Europe-Asia were severed last Wednesday off the Egyptian port of Alexandria while the FALCON system was cut in the Persian Gulf between the United Arab Emirates and Oman. A fourth incident was reported late on Sunday. It involves a (so-far) unnamed submarine link but reputable sources tell me it is the FALCON cable that has been hit for a second time. In this incident communications between Qatar and the United arab Emirates has been affected.

The peculiar series of cuts caused either serious service degradation or complete outage for Internet users across the Middle East and also in India, although traffic was gradually, but moderately quickly, restored on alternative cable systems and routes. The Indian operator VSNL said it managed to get the the majority of its customers’ IP traffic back online within 24 hours of the Wednesday cuts.

The close proximity of the cut cables and the obvious and immediate impact they had on key economies of the Middle East has led to fevered speculation on the just how so many could happen so quickly and so close together.

Adding to the mystery are the online news reports saying the Egyptian transport ministry has retracted its earlier explanation – that a slipping ship's anchor caused the damage to the two cables off Alexandria – after reviewing onshore video footage of the area at the time the outages happened.

Meanwhile, the official statement says, “The Ministry’s Maritime Transport Committee reviewed footage covering the period of 12 hours  before and 12 hours after the cables were cut and no ships sailed the area The area is also marked on maps as a no-go zone and it is therefore ruled out that the damage to the cables was caused by shipping.”

As might be expected, in online postings on sites such as Slashdot blame for the outages is being laid at the feet of both the US Secret Service and Islamic fundamentalists.