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."