Digital Black Out Sparks International game of Clue

Colonel Mustard, in the Mediterranean, with the boat anchor! There is an international mystery going on in the Middle East, and this may be the time we need a Colonel Mustard or James Bond to get to the bottom of this.
This international game of Clue, has eight main players, and no real lead to who is responsible. The players involved include: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain Pakistan and India.

D.J. Morales of AllHeadlineNews reports,“(Last week) Countries all over the Middle East experienced a disruption in Internet services Wednesday when a communications cable in the Mediterranean Sea was cut for reasons still unknown.” He continues, "This cut has affected Internet services in Egypt with a partial disruption of 70 percent of the network nationwide." What Morales has failed to report, CNN has not. CNN reports that not one, but two main cables were cut.

CNN reports, “The two cables damaged are FLAG Telecom's FLAG Europe-Asia cable and SeaMeWe-4 ( South East Asia Middle East Western Europe), a cable owned by a consortium of more than a dozen telecommunications companies.” Angry bloggers in the Middle East sound off . . . Syrian blogger from the UAE "Dubai Jazz", blames an Egyptian fisherman for the breakdown of Internet communications in the region. He writes: “I couldn't do anything significant during the slow down. I couldn't even post comments on my own blog let alone others. G-mail was also down.YouTube? … Forget about it.” What bothers most people is the dependency of all these countries on undersea cables, and how easily they can be disrupted, or even worse, cut completely. But most developed nations, such as the United States are fairly dependent on the internet as well. In the same CNN article, it reads, “

An official at Egypt's Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, speaking on condition of anonymity told AP it was believed that a boat's anchor might have caused the problems, although this was unconfirmed.” The results of this disturbance have cost countries such as India millions of dollars and also a million headaches. Both the trading on the National Stock Exchange (NSE) in Delhi and the SENSEX exchange in Bombay has been disrupted.


SeaMeWe-4 line

Chaos has also broken out in the UAE. UAE's public and private sectors were also hit hard with the cable outage. This outage also reached the television and telephone lines that also rely on those cables for transmissions overseas.

Wadah Tahah, business strategies and development manager for state-owned construction company EMAAR warned CNN Arabic that, if the outage continued, "such a situation could create problems between brokers, companies, and investors due to loss of control." Coincidently Iraq, Israel, and Lebanon were spared the insanity because these countries traffic their Internet from a different route, and many Middle East governments have back up satellite systems in case of such a failure. Is this a case of International terrorism? Or just a “boat anchor accident?”

Check out a related story at: http://elbrennan.blogspot.com/