Undersea Cables Cut: Oops or Uh-oh?

Third undersea Internet cable cut in Mideast

An undersea cable carrying Internet traffic was cut off the Persian Gulf emirate of Dubai, officials said Friday, the third loss of a line carrying Internet and telephone traffic in three days.

Ships have been dispatched to repair two undersea cables damaged on Wednesday off Egypt.

...

The loss of the two Mediterranean cables -- FLAG Telecom's FLAG Europe-Asia cable and SeaMeWe-4, a cable owned by a consortium of more than a dozen telecommunications companies -- has snarled Internet and phone traffic from Egypt to India.

More...

Bad luck or something else?



[edit on 1-2-2008 by loam]

my mother lives in bahrain and works for the us government. she said phones and e-mail were out there. she has been comunicating with me via cell phone. although those that need it have it, she said e-mail has trickled in slowly for her and all that has come deals only with government issues

This follows on from this thread Web disrupted across Mid-East

...seems Stumason may be able to add some additional insight from his contribution on that thread?

Although he mentioned a shipping incident off the coast of Alexandria that could have severed the other two lines and now overloaded or damaged the third, there is the thought at the back of my mind that it could be to blackout any internet-posted citizen journalism on something that is about to happen, given the rhetoric between various nations and military posturing in that region?

...just a thought

[edit on 1-2-2008 by citizen smith]

This is all sounding a bit stinky now. One cable accidentally cut by a ships anchor would be believable, but it's backup suffering a break shortly afterwards seems a bit fishy. Now a third serving the same region?
I'd have thought th cable areas would have been well known to shipping and their positions marked, thus eliminating the likelihood of such an expensive accident happening. Having 3 such incidents in 2 days doesn't sit right

Just found the following story / link on Whatreallyhappened.com.... is this cable number 4 now?

www.marketwatch.com...

One is an accident, two is maybe a coincidence, three starts to smell, and four....well let's see what happens next

Yeah, something seems to be up here. Did anyone see whether they stated how close in proximity all these cables are to each other? That could be very telling right there. If they are all running beside each other, that's one thing, but if they are all separated by some distance, then my red flags are going to go up.

I do think its a possibility it could be a form of intel gathering or containment, even if its accidental it would still be an intel coup when our enemies try other means to communicate.
I would rather not try to sink ships with loose lips.

reply to post by Britguy


From your posted source..

It may take sometime to fix the cut but we are rerouting the traffic to another cable in the U.K. and U.S

At reading this my 'back of mind' tingle became an itch...middle east data traffic routed solely through the UK/US cable-servers smells more fishy than frank the fish wearing eau-de-fish cologne

Didn't Dubai just purchase all the U.S. mortgage debt a couple weeks ago?

4 cables in two days. More than accident IMO.

Testing for our reaction during war?

[edit on 2/1/08 by makeitso]

So now ALL of that traffic is now routed thru servers in the US/UK? Wow, that to me seems like the easiest way to listen unobstructed to ALL communications with the ability to filter and reroute at will for the NSA and Brit intel.

or maybe it is another Cloverfield monster.....

Well, hold on to your seats, because this gets even better.

I read about this last night:

Report that someone severed tsunami buoy off Indonesian coast

Did someone intentionally move one of four tsunami detectors that sit off the coast of Indonesia?

Ridwan Djamaluddin, the head of that country's marine research center, tells AFP that one of the devices is missing, and he thinks "the unit was deliberately pulled out from its place."

"The buoy is attached with a steel line to an ocean floor unit. The steel line was severed at a depth of 150 meters," he tells the French news agency.


More...

Possibly four communication cables... one buoy... a falling spy satellite....

Any bets on a partridge in a pear tree?

EDIT: Changed the thread title to reflect the changing situation.

[edit on 1-2-2008 by loam]

reply to post by loam


Sounds like a James Bond rip-off: "C'mon Dr. evil, surrender, and people can surf the net again!".

Originally posted by makeitso
Didn't Dubai just purchase all the U.S. mortgage debt a couple weeks ago?

What better way to totally devalue that debt held by someone else that to cut all trading and internet dependant communications then launch an attack (on Iran presumably) and leave Dubai holding the 'Old Maid'?

Originally posted by loam
Possibly four communication cables... one buoy... a falling spy satellite....

Any bets on a partridge in a pear tree?

would it go something more like...

[...]
Fiiiiiiiive Muslim states
Four 'net cables
Three tsunami bouys
Two space anom'lys
And Pakistan with a nu-cl-ear treat






[edit on 1-2-2008 by citizen smith]

reply to post by citizen smith




That's just terrible...



On a serious note...these do seem like an awful lot of coincidences, don't they?

Here is an interesting graphic:

Yesterday and today, huge regions in Asia, Africa and the Middle East are suffering internet blackouts after two long, underwater fiber optic cables were severed, probably due to human error. One of the cables was the famous 17,000 mile FLAG cable, whose route from Japan around the Middle East to Europe you can see in the map above (it even goes through the Suez Canal). The worst part? According to Ryan Singel of Threat Level, this kind of outage likely represents the future of the global internet.

Source.

[edit on 1-2-2008 by loam]

im have a question. outside of the us does no government have satalite internet over there.

also according to my mother internet interuption was only gona be 2-3 days at the most. i spoke with her at 12est so that would be roughly 8-9 pm over there. we have a time change and they dont so i think its more like 8 hours ahead.

Yup, it's a Friday too. I'm on wwitv.com and I'm getting some streams out of Iran... I spotchecked 6, 1 was not in Iran but in Dubai. Try WHOIS if one has an interest. The 6 I've checked were slow but OK. I checked in the last 15 minutes.

Lemme check TVUNetworks... channel 98020 IRINN offline, but it's the only green over white over red flagged channel. Lotsa Russian.

Church Lady convenient. Where's Cheney today?

Vic

Someone, or some force or something is messin' with the Juniper glass.

[edit on 1-2-2008 by V Kaminski]

Originally posted by V Kaminski
I'm getting some streams out of Iran... I spotchecked 6, 1 was not in Iran but in Dubai. Try WHOIS if one has an interest. The 6 I've checked were slow but OK. I checked in the last 15 minutes.

[edit on 1-2-2008 by V Kaminski]

Vic's may be onto something.

Looks like Iran's main router has no data flow.



Iran Ministry of Foreign Affairs appears down.



[edit on 2/1/08 by makeitso]

There is is at least one positive to this situation.

I have recieved virtually NO spam email over the past few days versus the 50 plus I get normally get daily. Now we know where they are all coming from.