Internet Cripple in Sri Lanka, India and Middle East

A breakdown in an international undersea cable network (SE-ME-WE) has badly disrupted Internet links to India and Egypt on Wednesday. As a result most of the Sri Lankan internet users also experiencing a Internet slowdown since last Tuesday. India reported serious disruptions to its services and one Indian Internet service provider linked the problem to the Egyptian outage. "There has been a cable cut on several cable systems in Alexandria, Egypt which has impacted Internet connectivity in India," Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd (VSNL), an Internet service provider, said in a statement. VSNL said its service had been "largely restored" by diverting to another cable. India said it had lost more than half of its capacity. "There has been a 50 to 60 percent cut in bandwidth," Rajesh Chharia, president of the Internet Service Providers' Association of India, told Reuters. He told the Headlines Today news channel that a "degraded" service would be activated by Wednesday night, but full restoration will take 10 to 15 days. Chharia said companies, including some of India's many outsourcing businesses, had been affected.

Sri Lanka Telecom, the largest Internet services provider in Sri Lanka maintain a direct undersea link between Sri Lanka and India which is highly utilized for Internet connectivity and voice. Therefore most of the SLT services have also been disrupted.
Some of the following incidents may take effect.

• Web pages may take more than 35 seconds to load.
• Distrutions in streams of even 64 kbps radio station from London.
• Failure of most IM protocols such as JabberLive and AIM fail (with random socket errors)
• Failure of HTTPS authentication servers(timeout).
• Dial-up speeds when accessing European servers.

It was not known how the cable was cut but that services would probably take several days to return to normal.

[Source: IBN Live]