There have been rumors circulating for years that it is possible the entire Internet could “crash,” crippling commerce and communications worldwide. While most experts have dismissed these rumors as blatant fear mongering, in recent weeks it appears that the Internet did indeed suffer a kind of “partial crash,” affecting both the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent.
India in particular, was hard-hit by the Internet “black-out,” which affected the country’s sizable outsourced services industry, web hosting companies, and other high-tech commerce.
Experts blame the two continents’ Internet outage on a pair of undersea cables that appear to have been damaged late last month. The cables, which handle most telecommunications between Europe and the Middle East, run along the ocean floor between Alexandria in Egypt and Palermo in Italy. The cause of the damage is not yet known, though terrorism is not suspected at this time.
CNN reported that an official from Egypt’s Ministry of communications believes a boat anchor may have damaged the two communication lines, causing the Internet slowdown.
The outages affected most Middle Eastern countries including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait. Israel, however, was not affected by the outage, as they use a different Internet traffic route. Both Lebanon and Iraq were also unaffected by the fluctuations and Internet slow-down.
In India, there were concerns that the Indian National Stock Exchange could have been affected by the Internet outage. And other communications methods were affected by the outages as well. There were major disruptions in television and telephone services throughout much of India and the Middle East.
Dubai was particularly hard hit by the Internet slow-down, with officials claiming the incident “will have a major impact on our voice and Internet service.” Dubai is notoriously cutting edge when it comes to Internet technology, and the country is easily the most technologically savvy in the Middle East.
Still, even the most progressive and technical minded nations — like Dubai — were affected by the damaged lines and a slowdown in Internet and communications services. Dubai’s business center, which handles billions of dollars of transactions on a daily basis, was also affected.
Luckily, there was only low to moderate activity within the Dubai stock market on that day. If the outage had occurred on a day of heavy trading, the communications problem could potentially have been crippling to the market itself, as well as to hundreds of trading companies who rely on instant access to information in order to buy and sell stock for their clients.
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[...] Experts predict that there could be the equivalent of a massive “traffic jam” online, wherein wait times to access streaming media, e-mail and other services could be significant, but it is highly unlikely that there could be a worldwide crash of the system. Local crashes, such as that recently experienced in India and the Middle East, are possible and are far more likely according to experts. [...]
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