Mysteries under the sea: internet cables mysteriously cut!

There are more mysteries at the bottom of the sea than our fifth philosophy dreams. The paraphrase of Shakespeare's famous phrase seems to me perfect to describe what has been happening, in the last weeks, in the depths of our oceans.

Interoute, a network and internet infrastructure company, reported that recently, three of its four submarine cables that provide data traffic between Asia and North America have been disrupted or damaged.

Indian company Flag Telecom, meanwhile, reported that only in the past week had its submarine cables been damaged four times, affecting data traffic in the Middle East region. Although remote, the possibility that such events are the result of sabotage or terrorism exists. For Jonathan Wright, Interoute's worldwide sales director, the cable breakage would be caused by the anchors of large ships.

Obviously, these cables are not the only existing data communication route, as there is not – or at least there should not be, but this is another story – network infrastructure implementation (be it local network, wireless or conventional internet) without the planning and implementation of adequate redundancy.

However, the fall of a communication circuit, as the case may be, ends up overloading the other links and causing loss of performance and unavailability of several services. The Maldives Islands are, so far, the most affected area, with 100% of its internet service unavailable, followed by Egypt, with 82% of unavailable, and the UAE, with 68% of its services affected.

for these and others that I do not see the time of the DTN protocol, developed by NASA for the interplanetary internet, to start replacing our good old TCP / IP, as a way to mitigate the risks arising from a situation like this. And for you, what is causing this damage?

(Via: ZDNet.)