Slashdot Mirror
Millions in Middle East Lose Internet
Shipwack writes "Tens of millions of internet users across the Middle East and Asia have been left without access to the web after a technical fault cut millions of connections.
The outage, which is being blamed on a fault in a single undersea cable, has severely restricted internet access in countries including India, Egypt and Saudi Arabia and left huge numbers of people struggling to get online.
Observers say that the digital blackout first struck yesterday morning, with Egypt's communications ministry suggesting it was caused by a cut in a major internet pipeline linking it to Europe."
isn't this why we are supposed to have system redundancy? so a failure in one area won't cause a complete blackout?
isn't this why we are supposed to have system redundancy? so a failure in one area won't cause a complete blackout?
-I only code in BASIC.-
..if you read this as "Millions in Middle Earth Lose Internet"
Russian subs used to employ a cutting device on some of their submarines designed to cut the cables used in undersea sonar nets... I'm thinking it wouldn't take too much to start a war these days given how much we rely on these underwater communication cables. That said, it's more likely that a ship's anchor snagged it.
There is simply too much glass..
I'd assume this is the FLAG cable that the Egyptians were so proud of being a part of?
You'd think for a country like India, it would be in their country's/telecom industry's best interests to have more backup routes and capacity.
all i could think was "The fools! if only they'd built her with 6001 hulls! when will they ever learn!"
If this can happen to the Middle East, it can happen to Russia.
This is final proof that Russia can be cut off from "the internet".
Now about that Storm bot net....
Cutting cables merely temporarily deprives your opponent of his ability to use that cable. Far better to tap the cable and monitor everything that's being sent across it without your opponent knowing that you're listening in. It also has the added bonus that cable traffic is not typically encrypted as radio transmissions are.
Or will they blame sharks?
Or some other..."natural" disaster?
how odd. It is so strange to see a story like this not tagged as "whatcouldpossiblygowrong".
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
Maybe they're opposed to network neutrality?
Once a anchor is dropped,
who cares it pull's up?
It's not my department,
it's just my part time job!
THAT'S where all my spam went.
Karma: Neutered
Is that what you call a cable which doesn't withstand anchors dragging across it?
.."There has been a 50% to 60% cut in bandwidth, Rajesh Charia, president of the Internet Service Providers' Association of India told Reuters " .. Does this mean that all the outsourcing sweatshops will have to raise prices in order to cover their "investment in infrastructure" ?
http://revj.sourceforge.net
Imperial USA?
Colonialist Europe?
Isrealish Isreal?
Fundy Muslim Zealots?
Expansionist Oil-Seeking Chinese?
In the mid-east, even an internet outage is cause for energetic debate!
Take that, Putin!
so shouldnt they be cutt off from the global network, but still have a working 'web' of their own ?
They must have their own servers, anything going into that cable is just a 'foreign' request.
Those are important - sure, but i would gather they dont make up more then 40% of all requests.
But only some of the routes should be down, and they still should have a very large lan, with dns, www, email and anything else they have on the spot, and im willing to bet that the ISP's there have stuff like that.
IIRC the web wasnt just designed to be foolproof, it was also designed to be autonomus once disconected from other networks.
Or am i missing something here, and all that they have is cables, no other infrastructure ?
Will probably cause further re-evaluation of the Business Process Outsourcing model. And this time a more serious concern. The bloom first goes off BPO where you realize the logistical and cultural hurdles of dealing with a supplier/'partner' very far off-shore. This however is more crucial, because if you can always tell yourself that the BPO partner 'will get better' with time, but a lack of connectivity is like a lack of oxygen. Infrastructure re-evaluations are much more difficult to handle or weasel your way out of.
Filmo The Klown
Sounds like the SEA-ME-WE 3 cable
Yeesh, how did you get from 'Old news. Was reported and solved yesterday' to 'In 20 years, USA would be the mightiest military power with no brains.'??? It's not possible with logic! Especially given the fact that your premise is wrong: the bbc reports that it'll take a week for full service to be restored! (link)
Too sensationalist, tone it down will ya? Schools are STILL teaching real math and real science, despite all you doomsday theorists out there. This is especially true at the university level, where education is as good as it's always been.
You pick one example of a '60s era tech that has survived the ages, and conveniently forget the many thousands of inventions that never made it this far, and never made it long enough for us to even REMEMBER. Then you conveniently ignore all of the genius inventions being put forth today and focus on some crappy examples, kudos.
The US is suffering from lack of funding in basic research, but seriously, your "proof" is weak sauce.
That is not TCP, but rather BGP (Border Gateway Protocol). TCP handles data transmission and congestion control. It doesn't do routing.
I guess now would be the time to say it, then.
Deep breath, Rie.
*inhale*
I think the Danish cartoon controversy was really overblown.
Guess TCP was able route the packets through alternate gateways after detecting the problem.
1. TCP has nothing to do with routing packets. 2. IP also has nothing to do with selecting an "alternate gateway" after "detecting a problem". 3. If it was down for an hour, then I don't think this was anything to do with magical routing protocols. Human interaction was required to either repair the broken link or set up an alternate path.
According to the article:
Reports suggested that the lack of alternative routes for internet traffic meant only a small proportion of surfers were managing to get online. Egyptian officials said that around 70% of the country's online traffic was being blocked, while officials in Mumbai said that more than half of India's internet capacity had been erased, which could have potentially disastrous consequences for the country's burgeoning hi-tech industry."There has been a 50% to 60% cut in bandwidth," Rajesh Charia, president of the Internet Service Providers' Association of India told Reuters.
So it sounds like not every ISP was able to use the alternate path, and the alternate path didn't have sufficient bandwidth for those that could, anyway.
Mind you, the article then comes out with this astonishing "fact":
The shutdown highlighted the often frail nature of international communications: despite the vast number of individuals who have access to the web, nearly all internet traffic is routed through a small number of cables submerged deep below the oceans. It is then forwarded through an internet backbone consisting of just 13 servers which handle and direct all online requests.Is this the new version of the Majestik 12 that run the world?
I'm guessing this is a reference to [A-M].root-servers.net, but I'm pretty sure none of those are actually a single server, and several have multiple physical locations. Even so, the vast majority of even remotely popular sites will have their nameserver entries cached at a bazillion ISP DNS caches.
A lot more information is available from the Renesys Blog.
It was both the Flag Telecom and SEA-ME-WEA 4 cables outside of Alexandria, Egypt. The SEA-ME-WEA 3 cable is apparently OK.
In long distance telecommunications, you really need another path going "the other way around" to be safe. For example, many of the large companies with back-offices in India pay for routes both over the Atlantic to the Middle East to India (which might have been broken by this) and also West Coast to Pacific to Singapore to India (which would not have been).
At AmericaFree.TV, the steady Egyptian audience went to zero yesterday, presumably because of the break, while the audience in Iran, Iraq, the GCC, Pakistan and India did not seem to be affected.
...as if a million people cried out, and were suddenly silenced.
SCNR.
On the bright side, that will mean a lot less spam for the time being...
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?
A communications' disruption can mean only one thi... Oh never mind, that movie sucked.
Americans have several submarines specializing in cutting optical internet cables running under sea.
Maybe this was another one of those botched missions.
We're a big outfit that spends many millions on network infrastructure, so we have some clout with the various telcos and ISPs. We're all right Jack. You've got to wonder if any small company is going to be able to do the same thing. Presumably most of them will be relying on their ISPs, and those ISPs are presumably also going to prioritise their biggest customers as well...
An affected Internet user was quoted as saying "This is a conspiracy by the Western World and blaspheming Zionists to impede our progress and to crush our cultural values by carrying out such illogical 'accidents'."
Seriously given the magnitude of this, /. could have come up with a more factual and informative writeup.
/snip/
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/business/worldbusiness/31cable.html?ref=business
Two undersea telecommunication cables were cut on Tuesday evening, knocking out Internet access to much of Egypt, disrupting the world's back office in India and slowing down service for some Verizon customers.
One cable was damaged near Alexandria, Egypt, and the other in the waters off Marseille, France, telecommunications operators said. The two cables, which are separately managed and operated, were damaged within hours of each other. Damage to undersea cables, while rare, can result from movement of geologic faults or possibly from the dragging anchor of a ship.
One of the affected cables stretches from France through the Mediterranean and Red Seas, then around India to Singapore. Known as Sea Me We 4, the cable is owned by 16 telecommunications companies along its route.
The second cable, known as the Flag (for Fiber-optic Link Around the Globe) System, runs from Britain to Japan.
http://www.ndtv.com/convergence/ndtv/story.aspx?id=NEWEN20080039928&ch=1/31/2008%208:29:00%20AM
Internet service providers in India have put the disruption at 60 per cent of normal services while those in Egypt have been affected up to 70 per cent.
see his brilliant article in Wired on undersea communication cables.
I read in an article (maybe slashdot?) the way information is routed (because of peering) usually means it moves eastward. Example someone in France looking at a Chinese website would probably be routed over the Pacific, through the US, across the atlantic, and finally land in Western Europe. I guess because of lack of development they aren't many reliable backbones going through central asia.
Most of the middle east, northern and central Africa are also wired through Europe. While we like to assume the internet is this big interconnected web there are some regions that have a single pipe doing the work.
The dodgy internet connection I have in South Africa (yes we are basically at the butt end of internet connectivity...) today every few times my connection drops (I have always on ADSL)... ...and the lack of viagra spam in my spambox this morning...
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
What I'd really like to know, is if there is a correlated drop-off in spam; and if so, by what percentage ...?
I was so horrified at not getting my daily dosage of pretty firangi sluts that I got an anxiety attack. In fact, I had to watch TV for the first time in months just to get glimpse of some barely acceptable clevage. Thank you FTV, but you don't do it for me. Nor does anything else on the TV, damn, how much have I fallen.
I am not used to this kind of brahmacharya or celibacy, and am feeling extremely restless and agitated.
This thing needs to be fixed ASAP else I assure you people will die.
PS: I'd much rather kill kittens
Since we have lotsa redundant connections here.
Lucky us!
hemi
I am from india, and from experience i know it is sh** for gamers. Yesterday my ping was 12780!!!!!
An unintended WoW break now for weeks now..
The Internet gets cut off from Russia!
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
Every night I back up the internet to my RAID array to protect myself from this and similar eventualities.
If I buy you a camera, will you take a picture of the sky in your world? The rest of us would love to see what color it is. Basic education is failing. Civil and social infrastructures are failing. University education is now job training (and not very good either, because Universities are several years behind in knowing what type of jobs are out there). Today's inventions are usually nothing more than intellectual mashups of previous work. New innovations and new successes are more about marketing and sales than usefulness and originality.
rewriting history since 2109
Reminds me of something that happened around last year.
It's basically the exactly same thing happening. "Fun".
Don't quote me on this.
Obviously there's a hole in the tube so all the data has leaked out and the water has leaked in. The data, being lighter than water, will have floated to the top and evaporated away. Once the tube has filled with water, the incoming data is unable to push the water out of the way.
First they need to blow some air down the tube and inspect the tube for bubbles, then put a patch over it. Once that is done, they'll need to drain all of the water out of the tube, possibly just by blowing air down it some more. Finally, they will be able to allow data to flow again. The first few gigabytes are probably going to come through a bit damp, but after that it should be fine.
No more sex for ARABS http://google.com/trends?q=sex :)
And here it is in graph form
That would explain the lack of telemarketers, they have no VoIP connections to enable them to bug me.
Am I the only one who first read this is 'Millions in Middle East Lose Interest', and was hopeful for a moment about the future?
"Failed US attempt to wiretap Iranian internet results in transcontinental loss of internet connectivity. Two special forces divers mysteriously missing."
I anticipate Asian stock markets will see a nice rise given that India and the Middle East will actually be getting some work done today.
Man, imagine what I could achieve if the same thing happened in the UK!
Ah well, best go and check b3ta.com again.
If they also cut the phone connections, the roads and the airways, Europe would be a happier, more relaxed place. I'm sure we can get houmous and couscous without bothering with the Middle East.
*\o/* the amount of v14gr4 or ph4mz 4 ch3ap spam will be greatly reduced. what on earth will we do with all this available bandwidth!
Donald Ray Moore Jr. (mindrape)
Suspected Terrorist
Finally, users can say "the internet is down" and they would correct.
... by the fact that news.bbc.co.uk is asking for comments from anyone affected. Paraplegics, take one step forward...
The MPAA caught little timmy downloading the matrix, and in the middle east they got their way
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
I would like to see a write up on how the businesses that have outsourced all of their IT staff and customer care to India are faring in this Internet blackout. Run, shareholders, run!
Because he abbreviated the Acronym. The correct form is:
DJIADNADSD.
"Dammit, Jim, I'm a Doctor, not a Deep Sea Diver!" (RIP DeForrest Kelley.)
Such acronyms will be used forever to indicate being coaxed to speculate outside one's area of professional expertise.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
... as if millions of voices were suddenly silenced and suddenly cried out in frustration.
(\__/) This is Lapinator
(='.'=) copy it in your sig
(")_(") so it can take over the world
divers will find a backhoe sitting on the sea floor near where the cable was cut.
... productivity in the affected parts of the world increased by several orders of magnitude.
http://thyme.apnic.net/current/data-summary
Transit ASes present in the Internet Routing Table: 3490
I call horseshit
That's where I generally find things when I lose them.
I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.
For not moving past the 7th Century.
No more infolinks... transmissions of any kind... We'll start again... live in villages... If you receive this, if you survive - then find us! Find us!
"The Egypt's..." is that like the Iraq, and such as?
Sig Registration Form 34c_766(a) submitted to Ministry of Signature Management. Approval pending.
That explains the increase in requests for web programming in the last day even though the market is crashing... as people can't reach their outsourcers in India.
Could it be that the middle east has been slashdotted?
Worst. Signature. Ever.
So when will we start fixing all those black holes around the universe with duct tape? They seem to be a nuisance for everything around them.
Wait, wait...that's not what universal repair technology means? Lies!
I don't like Linux. This doesn't make me a troll.
Damn...how is Osame gonna survive in his cave if he can't surf for his beloved goat porn?
Oh, the inhumanity...damn infidels!
We have seen a great reduction in the number of port scans and hack attempts... yes, the connection to Asia is definitely gone!
Being an Internet abuse consultant, I for one am VERY happy that they have limited to no Internet connectivity.
Awwwwwwwwwwww, what a shame, the biggest subnets that attack North American ISP/Hosts are having trouble? Good for them. Take your time fixing this one.
A great disturbance in the Force. It was like a million voices crying out in unison, then suddenly silenced.
Who says it wasn't just cut?
People have always gawked at celebrities, and being a rock star has always been cooler than being a scientist. There's no use crying that the world is going to the dogs because of these two facts when they've been going on since forever.
Dealing with lawyers would be a lot less tedious if they all looked like Casey Novak.
You can find additional information about this fault, a mapof all the submarine cables in the Med, and details on the plans for future cables in this region here: http://www.telegeography.com/cu/article.php?article_id=21528&email=html
--
Let me fix that for you:
That kind of repetition is called redundancy!There, it's now fixed!
http://www.internettrafficreport.com/history/267.htm
Tehran flatlined. Not much impact on Europe, or Africa,
but...where is their redundancy?
I am willing to put the blame on...
a...
Internet Disconnection Device, known as a BackHoe!
Visit this forum to get educated about "ze" jews and their innumerable contributions to improving the human condition. Get educated.
http://www.jabootu.com/images/jaws2cable.jpg
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
But how could we possibly live without trojans, spam, and Nigerian millionaire scams?
It isn't bad at all if you choose the low res version in preferences and keep javascript and images turned off. Dialup is all I can get in my area and the web is still usable and not all that bad, just some websites are really lame about providing alt text links, insist you keep active scripting or even worse, flash. And the web is so large you quickly develop workaround sites to choose from.
... did they really notice?
According to CNN, part of Africa was hit as well. I'm worried. I just sent $1000 to a fellow over there to cover the costs needed to release $100,000 I won in a contest. He was supposed to get back to me via email.
What about the call centers in Asia? I believe dell has their call centers in India
Its as if a million voices cried out and were suddenly silenced. Or something. I'm none too good at this meme crap
Hi, I Boris. Hear fix bear, yes?
In the summer of 2005 the undersea fibre optic cable to Pakistan, a branch of the SEA-ME-WE3 line, was cut, disrupting Internet access to that country for weeks and crippling its nascent high tech sector.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4630457.stm
Now with the cut to this critical Mid-East cable, the possibility comes to mind that the U.S has undertaken a program to tap into all telecom lines running into the Muslim world. An egregious violation of sovereignty if its true. The disruptions could be due to mistakes while installing the taps, or they could be purposeful because the repairs would be an opportunity to slip in monitoring equipment.
This 2001 article discussed the NSA tapping fibre optic cables
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-529826.html
In short its not easy, but it can be done, and capabilities can have only improved in the past 7 years. The USS Jimmy Carter is the prime suspect. The cost was estimated at $2 billion a year, an amount which can easily be hidden in the intelligence budget.
It would not be the first time. In the 1970s the Pentagon tapped into Soviet copper cables on the Siberian coast.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9904EED6123EF93BA35752C1A96E958260
Please fix the Internet Tubes
Hmm, it seems like we need more tubes so the data can flow freely.
Hhhhmmmm, I also work in a huge multi-international company and we have had one site go down today but not due to this. We have sites located all over this area and if anything at all we never had an issue at all and went to back up right away with out any end users noticing a thing. We also pay millions for our network infrastructure and have a direct line for ourselves. Not all of the Middle East is totally down....... But people have to understand that relying on the internet and technology only is not always the way to be, there will always be breaks somewhere as well as power outages. Working with technology for years in all types of feilds, I find too many people do not understand that you always need a backup of some kind whether it be pen and paper and a trip to the library!
I'm in Malaysia and my crappy ISP (TM Net) used to send some US bound packets via Europe past the Atlantic then across the USA to the US west coast. That sure hurt for online games with servers in the USA.
Now things are a bit better as they go via the pacific ocean. Not very much better (ISP is still crap - I'm sticking to them partly because they have a less crap T&C than the other alternative ISPs, and partly because the other ones seem to be worse in some cases).
Neal Stephenson wrote a great piece about undersea cables, and FLAG in particular, called "Mother Earth Motherboard" http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html Flag lands at Alexandria and runs across Egypt because the Suez canal is too shallow and is dredged too often for a cable to be safe. He talks about anchor snags too. One creepy thing about the article- he wrote it in 97, note the reference to the World Trade Center collapsing.
that's what I saw the first THREE times I read the story. The third time I remembered it was Internet but I still saw "interest" - what are they not interested in? did they lose the interest from their bank savings? what?
Na na na na na na, na na na na na na na, na na na na na na na na na...
(apologies to the Bangles, and to the Egyptians too... this is really a tragedy, but a temporary one we hope)
So it was just disconnected from other regions? So all middle eastern hosts were still available? Now if the US was cut off from Europe would we say that "The US was left without access to the web" ? No, of course not. Article title is very misleading.
"The shutdown highlighted the often frail nature of international communications: despite the vast number of individuals who have access to the web, nearly all internet traffic is routed through a small number of cables submerged deep below the oceans. It is then forwarded through an internet backbone consisting of just 13 servers which handle and direct all online requests."
Yes, there are only 13 physical root servers. You got us. We spent all that root server money on beer.
(And all the money is controlled by only 13 jewish bankers in a deep underground vault as well)
Call the company and demand the engineers be fired. Tell them you want 3 months of free service.
Is this the new version of the Majestik 12 that run the world? They've just taken inspiration from the old computer game Deus Ex where all of the world's Internet traffic passed through Aquinas - a super router housed in a nuclear bomb proof underground complex, set up so that the NSA could monitor everything. In the game, you get the option to blow it up, plunging the world into a new Dark Age. The game took place in the near future of the 21st century but it looks like it has started already. Be on the look out for a chap in a long, black leather trenchcoat and shades, wielding a katana. He'll probably hit Hong Kong next, followed by New York City...
It's:
Na na na na, na na na na, hey India, goodbye
They'll never call me, the way that they call me
'Cause if they did, you know, they'd make me cry
They might be talkin' baby about my bill (my bill, my bill)
So good-bye India
Not gonna miss it! Goodbye, now
Na na na na, hey India, goodbye
Na na na na, na na na na, hey India, goodbye
They never hear you, that bill-collectin' Hindu
When all those overdue bills are fallin' baby from the sky
They're surely talkin' baby about my bill (my bill, my bill)
So good-bye India
Not gonna miss it! Goodbye, now
Na na na na, hey hey-ey, goodbye
[fade in]
Hey hey-ey, goodbye
Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey-ey, goodbye
Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey-ey, goodbye
Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey-ey, goodbye
[repeat many times and fade out]
Re: your last point, remember that the WTC was attacked twice, the first time with a truck-bomb in 1993, which wasn't successful in taking down the building (because some fscking rude New Yorker had taken the parking place next to the pillar they'd planned to park the truck in
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Also, if you look at how internet transmission works, while you obviously want geographical redundancy, that doesn't mean that you don't send traffic on all available routes. Carriers are going to make sure they've got enough redundancy for their critical load levels (e.g. the voice network and private-line customers), but if they're doing redundancy at Layer 3 they're going to send traffic across multiple routes because it doesn't make sense to leave them idle.
To some extent, if you're doing Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing, and if you haven't lit up all your wavelengths (because the optics and routers at the end are expensive), you can sometimes divert some wavelengths to the alternate routes. For instance, you'd provision wavelengths A, B, and C on the west route and Z, Y, X on the east route, and if something breaks you can push them onto the other route. But once your cable fills up, you've got less ability to do that until you build more cables or put even more expensive optics on the ends to light them.
And sometimes you just get surprised - like the big Taiwan earthquake last year that took out N-1 of the undersea cables between northern and southern Asia, which almost all go between Taiwan and the Philippines since that's what the ocean floor shape makes you do. They were spread out far enough to avoid problems with ship-anchors, but the quake was over a wide area. And there was a quake in the Med a couple of years ago that took out more than two cables as well.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
"Egypt's communications ministry suggesting it was caused by a cut in a major internet PIPELINE linking it to Europe." So, it really is made out of tubes...
I think they should re-cut the cable, and cut the other ones going to India, too.
:p
That way, I won't have to try to understand some Indian call-center person reading straight out of a book - and them not understanding I have more IT knowledge than the average sheep the book was written for.
Following internet cables were cut within a span of an hour.
FLAG - Owned by Reliance India
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber-Optic_Link_Around_the_Globe
SE ME WE 4 - Owned by VSNL India
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEA-ME-WE_4_(cable_system)
Most spam is sent from the US and Western Europe. East Europe, South America and the far east come next. The Mid east contribution would be close to negligible were it not for Israel and Turkey. (This is based on my own statistics on a few hundred messages that were sent by a particular botnet over the last two years. Statistics based on more data might vary but I doubt they would vary significantly on the main sources, i.e. western countries).
Spam sources are quite proportional to network usage. Most spam is sent by hijacked zombie PCs. I wonder if countries where everyone can get their up to date pirated security software don't have an advantage in this respect over countries were people actually pay for the stuff (or don't pay and don't use up to date security).
I blame it on the PHISHERMEN!
How do the trillions we spend on military force keep us from suffering electronic information sabotage by those who wish to harm us?
A close source of mine, without coming right out with it, indicated that the Bush administration is responsible for the severed cables. When the time comes to run new cables, they will come complete with integrated hardware which will allow easier monitoring/tracking/decoding of sensitive communications, as well as the ability to remotely sever the lines in times of crisis.
I have worked in undersea cable for C&W for a long time. I have worked on great undersea cable as COMPAC and ANZCAN. Never, ever did I find someone cutting undersea cable. The makers of the cable guarantee the product to last 25 years maintenance free.They run on very high voltage. These cables run on the seabed and are very hard for human beings to go and cut or even sharks to tear them.
This seems to be a technical problem. Most likely poor splicing at the joints which has resulted in repeater failure.
Tell the cable owner and manufacturer to preach a different choir. No all technical people are dumb. We know the technology, how it operates and how it is deployed.
As for UAE internet issue, any major telco will need to have divrse path. Dont put all eggs in one basket. Its about time the rich sheikhs here invest in their own undersea cable joint venture and inter-connect the world. DOnt spend the money on services like building stadiums, paying huge sums of money to get celebratees here. Invest in your countries future.
salaam