Cable damage disrupts internet services

A sub-sea cable carrying more than 75% of traffic between the Middle East, Europe and America has been damaged.

According to news service Bloomberg, internet and telephone communications between the Middle East and Europe have been impacted by submarine cable failures between Italy and Egypt in the Mediterranean Sea.

Bettina Tratz-Ryan, research vice-president at Gartner, said, "Personally, I think this is very dramatic." She said that the disruption in network traffic could impact e-commerce sales during the busiest weekend before Christmas. "It will have a substantial impact."

Tratz-Ryan said, "People take network communications for granted, but the underlying network needs to be secure."

Alex Smith, research analyst at Canalys, said, "These type of problems have happened before. Network connects will be re-routed, but connections will be slower."

Interoute was one of the European telco providers to spot the problem. Jonathan Wright, director of wholesale products of UK ISP Interoute, said, "The potential impact of an outage of this size cannot be underestimated - it is like severing a major artery. In a global economy with financial centres based around the world, and an increasing use of outsourced call centres and IT departments, it is essential that companies are confident in their communications networks."