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How One Clumsy Ship Caused A Major Net Outtage
Ant writes "Here is an interesting world map of various Internet connections, showing how it took just one vessel to inflict the damage that brought down the internet for millions."
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This ought to be tagged as coming from the "Lack of Redundancy Department".
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
All those virus writers struggling so hard, and then a simple ship gets all the bragging rights.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
I'd assume it cut all the cables?
So far they found 3 cable cuts. According to this BBC article http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/-/2/hi/technology/7222536.stm - A third submarine internet cable is severed in the Middle East, compounding global net problems.
The important thing is not to stop questioning --Albert Einstein.
It's funny see all the wild speculations and accusations that it was deliberate sabotage by the US the other day, when there was no proof whatsoever.
Now that the facts have come out, I'd like to see those slashbots apologize for undermining the US at every turn and being so unpatriotic.
Obviously this is the result of U2 manager Paul McGuinness calling on ISP's to disconnect the evil file sharers of the world..
;)
"To great applause from the audience of music managers, McGuinness insisted that disconnection enforcement would work."
How right he was!
Yes, it's possible that the cable was cut to install spying equipment. If you are at all concerned about spying, you should encrypt your data before transmitting it over the Internet.
Before they had the internet. Also they even have the internet there?
They should follow the example of the telephone company. Find the owners of the ships and send them a bill for the repair costs. That will get their attention.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
The text is completely illegible.
"The whole subsea franchise operation is due to change dramatically in the next 18 months, but the question is how we cope in the meantime. You always have to assume that this kind of thing is going to happen."
Does anyone know what they mean by this?
"It is better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees." - Albert Camus
Sure you can see from the map they pulled the cables way too tight, but given the line width those things must be like 2 to 5 miles wide. :-)
Seriously as previous slashdot postings, one or two accidents may be a coincidence but three within a few weeks sounds more like a pattern.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
I thought we had agreed that it was George Bush that cut the cables. Did everyone change conspiracy theories while I was away?
The image linked from the summary does not depict the physical locations of cables, but is a schematic of existing connections between points on the globe. The lines in that image have not much to do with where the cables actually are. A more realistic representation of (a subset of) the world's submarine cable networks would e.g. be this big PDF or, in a more comprehensive view, that one (sold for a mere $350 :-| ).
"A communications disruption can mean only one thing - invasion."
- We all know who.
If you were offended by anything I said... No, I'm not sorry. Please lighten up.
But the Internet has become too centralized for even basic self-healing envisioned by TCP/IP researchers. Egypt is not an island and should have had many smaller capacity links to it's neighbors as well as satellite connections run by different companies. Every ISP and phone company in the world should have an agreement to provide emergency routing outside the usual patterns.
I was hoping the news would be "cable cut, millions of surfers notice a slowdown in streaming video".
Think of all the 1's and 0's flowing into the ocean right now?! The cost to the environment here is appalling. Someone turn the valves on that internet backbone, stat! Think about the animals!
Caused by politics and telco monopolies created a network without redundancy. A combination of the infeasibility, due to the political situation, of overland links through the middle east and central Asia, and the hidebound Indian telco not providing sufficient redundancy in connections out of the country, never mind the total misallocation of resources inside it, are the cause of this. TCP/IP is specifically designed to recover from link outages, if it doesn't, you've got an improperly designed and/or operated (statically, as opposed to dynamically, routed) network.
Good news for US and European IT workers though: that buffoon who offshored your jobs has to explain why the IT department has been down for a few days. I guarantee the CEO/CFO is not amused that he can't get to SAP, or that the stores can't upload, or that whatever other mission critical system is off-line isn't working.
The communication lines between Alice and Bob were cut, Eve to blame?
That's a busy ship, dragging anchor and cutting cables that are 1500 miles apart.
Fortunately, internet service in Israel and Iraq is unaffected and Iran is blacked out.
Off into the distance you can see the anchoring area. All the cables except the one that goes around the horn of Africa go through this channel. Maybe now it doesn't look so far fetched?
At the bottom, it suggests that "terabytes a second" is denoted by "tbps".
Surely "TB/s" would be terabytes, but they in fact meant terabits?
Then again, it's from The Guardian, this is par for the cause.
or that the stores can't upload
Upload? Upload? Everything is download nowadays. You download from the intarweb, you download to the intarwed. You download CDs and DVDs to you PC, you download to your phone and you dowload your phone and PDA to the PC. You download to the server.
Are you stuck in the 90's? There is no upload. Get over it!
By the old ,,, +++ATH0 hack. ^8^>
How one clumsy finger caused an ugly headline!
Looking at the east coast of the US of the linked picture, it appears as though every single underseas line is going into New York City, with only a few also extending to Miami. Why is the east coast so non-redundant? Especially given NYC's recent history of being a prime target for terrorism, it seems as though you'd want lines also going into other major urban centers on the east coast, such as Washington DC, Boston, Philadelphia, etc.
Does anyone know of a reason it's all being piped into New York?
I've definitely noticed a drop in sales calls from indian call centres over the past few days. I normally suffer from a few a day, maybe 2 or 3, but it's been wonderfully quiet for aq couple of days now - bliss!
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
So I guess that the Azores was lucky that a cable came their way(perhaps just São Miguel) and took a small detour. I would have thought that more wires would go that way but I guess that distance is not an issue. Maybe it is a harder route.
:D Anyway, interesting stuff.
From the map, it seems that some places a sea path has been chosen instead of a land based route, I guess it must be because it is easier.
If this is how the cables to on shore, it is bound to give problems.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Submarine_Telephone_Cables_PICT8182_1.JPG
Governments have also become directly involved, with the Egyptian communications ministry imploring surfers to stay offline so business traffic can take priority. "People who download music and films are going to affect businesses who have more important things to do," said ministry spokesman Mohammed Taymur.
And here's a big difference with the US. If the US were in the situation of limited bandwidth, we would all be encouraged to stop sending email to give priority to those shopping on iTunes.
Adapt, adopt, or get out of the way!
Faster connections/downloads/etc in the countries not affected? Are we seeing a decrease in spam right now?
I have noticed less spam since the cables broke. I say leave the cables broken or better yet get rid of all the cables in that area.
As we learned from the movie Hackers, computer networks should be taking down ships, not the other way around. Has the whole world gone topsy-turvy on me?
Maybe there's some sailor/hacker out there called Ahab-Override who can save the day...
It is not the ship's fault. The cable installer should have buried them properly. Movement of silt on the sea floor could have exposed the cable and caused it to be strung 'in the water', in which case it can be snagged very easily.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Wow, youre crazy. Any more gems for us? Roswell? Bigfoot?
My suspicions were correct. The cross-section clearly shows that the outer layer of the cable is actually a TUBE!
So name calling is how you discuss things? That is all you can say? DO you have something to add to the conversation or are you just a sheeple?
You may not draw the same conclusions, but facts are facts.
IF you want to act like a child, go to Digg or 4chan.
The "World cable capacity" plot at the bottom of the map is misleading. Total capacity is 7.1 tbps and used capacity is 2.1 tbps. They visualized the values as circles, so the ratio of areas should be 7.1:2.1. But instead they set the diameters to that ratio. The result is that capacity appears 9% used when it is actually 30% used (and 80% purchased).
The "Internet users affected by the Alexandria accident" plot to the left uses circles correctly.
I still think the NSA or the Bush administration had something to do with it. How much of a coidnece is it that the wires power a majoridy of the Middle East's Internet? And that the NSA would love to drill into the Internet and harvest all that illeally obtained data?
And I thought the NSA couldn't sink any lower... now their as low as the sea where the wires were...
What gets me mad is how in a few months, this whole thing will be forgotten (just like all the "coincidences" with 9/11), so if there was a government conspiracy, it will be buried...
One ship cutting one cable is plausible, but unlikely. One ship cutting two cables, is odd and barely explicable, but possible if the cable engineers were really, really stoopid. One ship cutting 3 cables? Ah, no, we're not that gullible...this is a planned attack. For what reasons, I can only guess, but since the EnRon days bandwidth has been a commodity and so I'd guess it's someone playing nasty with the commodities market -- just like they do with energy futures. I say this is more likely than some attempt to censor, because there's still traffic flowing...it just costs a lot more, due to the laws of supply and demand.
Yes, I do have professional knowledge of fibre optics and Internet connectivity. No, it isn't recent, but about six years old. Make of it what you will.
The U2 is a plane, not a sea vessel!
Remember - these "clumsy ships" are how you get your bad ass computers, wide screen TV's and crude oil. These "clumsy ships" are vital to the way the world gets the things that they want / need. The captain made an error in judgment, but I am certain that all of the professional bulk carrier sea captains and ships mates that are reading this would have done differently...
--I like turtles...
the odds of three undersea cables being accidentally cut off at almost the same time is virtually zero. it was a test and a warning.
Is it suspicious that the ship is never named?
i will answer that. I am a half ass colombian(colombian pop) . I grew up in the states, but lived and worked in Colombia for a time, and know, or at least knew their infrastructure fairly well. Colombia at one point in time had two internet companies. EPM(emtelsa) which is state run and owned. And Telesat, which is privately owned, Enrique Biaz I think was the CEO, offered me job around 2002 when I was running around there. I just didnt want to move to Cali. I liked Manizales. Anyway Telesat in Colombia is the link that is down, so one provider is down, not the entire country, because most people use the Emtelsa, or whatever the have evolved into. So while telesat link is down(I think they have changed their name) the country is still online for most everyone else.
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
"So name calling is how you discuss things...IF you want to act like a child, go to Digg or 4chan."
As long as we are name calling how about this one - Hypocrite
At the bottom of the map linked in the submission is a diagram of how much capacity is used, available, and bought on the trans-Atlantic cable. Unfortunately the caption says "terabytes" but each of the labels in the diagram use "tbps". Someone doesn't know how to distinguish between terabits and terabytes.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
It takes a subgenius to figure out what's going on. I wonder if Iran be the last nation Bush & co have time to fuck up. I certainly hope so.
It looks from that map that Sweden and Norway don't have any cables connecting them across the Baltic Sea to the rest of Europe. So they must get their connections from landlines across their huge, mountainous and largely unpopulated peninsula, all the way back to Finland, Russia etc. It's a short run across the strait to Denmark, which already has at least one cable landing terminal, and probably 80%+ of Norwegians/Swedes live right there. I wonder why they don't run that cable. Undersea rights of way have got to be cheaper than across land.
--
make install -not war
There's only a single cable on that map connecting Ireland to the Internet. The English Channel has lots of shipping. That seems like something the Irish government would want to get fixed right away. Maybe another cable to Britain.
Or better yet, a cable to France, for not just geographical diversity but also geopolitical diversity. A cable to the Netherlands would give even better interconnectedness.
And of course it would be even better if that connection landed somewhere else than Dublin, so there's no failure bottleneck point.
Any extra cables would also increase Ireland's overall Internet bandwidth. As that country climbs out of the Industrial Age (and really the Farming Age), it'll need more than one cable. Especially if it doesn't want to get squeezed by some "bottleneck master".
--
make install -not war
but Israelis are being told to prepare for war
It is always better to be a first grade version of yourself than a second grade version of someone else.
On the cable map, Greenland looks only slightly less vulnerable than Asia (its like I'm playing Risk). Good thing that kind of redundancy was clearly thought out from the start. Wouldn't want to lose communications with the metropolis of Nuuk or the 12 faculty members at the University of Greenland.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
The problem is not lack of redundancy, the problem is lack of bandwidth, imagine i have an STM-16 in one direction and another STM-16 in the other direction and both of those are running high (>75%). If I lose one the net will reconverge, in just a few minutes, however now i have 2.5gb*1.75 running over a single 2.5g link. Problem is not with the network, it's a problem with Service Providers not having ample b/w in a failure scenario!
Seems like under Maritime Law, items abandoned/sunk/lost on the sea floor in International Waters are subject to being recoverable and salvageable?
These cables DO contain valuable metals in them like copper, aluminum, and steel (probably stainless)? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_communications_cable
(I do realize that some of the recent cable cuts are not in international waters, but is still is an interesting query.)
I am not endorsing any harm of, nor the "salvaging" of any undersea cabling.
However, there are many, many others in the world who do not have the same sense of right and wrong (and virtually all of these examples are NOT in International Waters.)
http://www.google.com/search?num=50&hl=en&safe=off&q=wire+theft+copper+aluminum&btnG=Search
- 95% of all statistics are made up on the spot
- Figures never lie, but liars always figure
Besides, what ever happened to re-routing the traffic based on policy, distance vector, or path vector routing? Why are they completely cut off if only one entry point to their portion of the network was cut?Other than this text, there is no discernible information contained in this sig.
The article has this to say on the cause of the damage:
"According to reports, the internet blackout, which has left 75 million people with only limited access, was caused by a ship that tried to moor off the coast of Egypt in bad weather on Wednesday."
According to whose reports? Published where? What was the name of the ship? How was it discovered that it caused all the damage? Is the same ship also responsible for the third cable cut, which did not occur in the Mediterranean, and later than Wednesday?
This what you refer to as "facts". I sure hope you intended sarcasm.
"Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity." - Marshall McLuhan
HELL YEAH THE PLANE TAKES OFF! (cutting some cables in the process.)
A horse can't be sick, you know, even if he wants to.
Check out this poster from which they made the graphic:
http://www.telegeography.com/products/map_cable/index.php
If it wasn't $250 I might pick one up.
Crystal Meth: Would you ingest somthing made from a poisonous gas and an explosive metal? You do it every day -- Salt!
In 2004, the signs in the river next to manhattan warning ships of a submerged gas pipeline were removed -- I assume it was fear that someone would try to do this on purpose. But, I think that the increased chance of someone damaging it by dropping anchor outweighs the chance of intentional damage... but I feel safer now that these safety signs have been removed (sarcasm).
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
*NO CARRIER* ..From a Soviet Russian point of view..,
*NO CARRIER*
A horse can't be sick, you know, even if he wants to.
They have a survey on that page: "Have you been affected by the disruption to internet services? You can tell us your experiences using the form below:"
Something tells me such a survey would not be very scientific.
Table-ized A.I.
The InterNet's parent, the military ArpaNet, was designed with no head or center, in order to survive a major war. Root name servers are a bit of a weeakness. But wayward ships and elementary school hackers seem have a good shot too.
Obviously this Anonymous Coward needs lessons in semantics.
I didn't call him a name, I didn't say he was crazy - I suggested his actions were childish. They added nothing.
Neither do yours.
The Indian stock markets had already closed when reports of the collapse first surfaced on Wednesday, but the impact of a 50% drop in bandwidth was being felt keenly yesterday - particularly by the country's expansive outsourcing industry.
After seeing colleagues getting replaced by H1B's and outsourcing, I find it really hard to be sad about this.
Table-ized A.I.
Ok now there are TWO cuts - another that happened Friday. Care to explain this tidy coincidence?
"TCP/IP is specifically designed to recover from link outages, if it doesn't, you've got an improperly designed and/or operated (statically, as opposed to dynamically, routed) network"
That would be BGP, the interdomain routing protocol. TCP/IP is designed to recover from packet losses not day-long link outages.
I thought it was CIA or whatever name they are doing their secret operations under now screwing up major:
1) existing splices rerouted thru existing infrastructure
2) one of links fail
3) splices give up and sever connection as it cannot be reliably copied anymore...
i was just crawling google news and noticed that a 3rd cable had been cut off the coast of dubai.
http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssTechMediaTelecomNews/idUSL0125034820080201
details are scarce at this point, but i wonder if the the egypt cable was really an accident. or if it was, has it given some malefactors some ideas? could this turn into a way for political tensions to present themselves?
i remember reading an article written by neal stephenson for wired in the late 90s. somewhere in it he addressed the issue of a 'fiber war' where nations and other actors would begin cutting undersea cables. it's an old article, but i remember some expert referring to it as 'mutually assured destruction'. (like nuclear war.) meaning that once a couple of cables are cut, it's so easy to cut more quickly, and pretty soon all the cables are cut relatively no time at all. an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind; or disconnected in this case.
"The pair of cables -- which lie near each other on the floor of the Mediterranean Sea -- at some points are no thicker than the average human thumb."
From CBC News: "No quick fix for undersea cables serving India"
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2008/02/01/tech-india.html
It's fairly clear that somebody is isolating the ME from the Net.
It damn sure isn't Al Qaeda - they don't have submarines or diving equipment or even much motivation. Neither does anybody else I can think of including Russia and China.
Israel and the US on the other hand do have both the hardware and the motivation.
Likelihood in order of probability:
1) Attack on Gaza by Israel - where numerous war crimes will be committed.
2) Attack on Lebanon by Israel - ditto. Less likely than Gaza because of the Winograd report out this week.
3) Attack on Iran by Israel - to bring the US into a war with Iran. This is Dick Cheney's preferred plan, since it allows him to bypass Congressional authorization and having to explain to anybody how the US got in the war.
4) Attack by the US on Iran directly.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
The map in the Guardian article is quite interesting, the most amazing thing about it to me is there are three cables going to Anchorage Alaska with a fourth one planned. Why all that capacity? For a population of only 670 thousand (2006 estimate) I'm assuming they must have pretty darn good internet coverage and bandwidth there!
Wow, they're really asking $350 dollars for a digital copy of a map with some lines on it. I just couldn't beleive it until I saw it.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
This article only mentions dependacy and after math. Its does explain the accidents at all.
Internet Traffic watch:
http://www.internettrafficreport.com/asia.htm
India is hanging by a thread,
and Iran is offline.
Did you know Colombia is offline too?
Florida? ( well, actually, who cares about that...)
Its kinda silly, with redundancy, the map of the world looks like a loop. Cut it in the middle, and you can still go around the other side, albet slowly. What about Satilite uplinks? Bolians CA hasnt a hope in hell of getting DSL, yet, their satilite works pretty fast, but there is a 6,000ms lag.
Re: "shift happens"
Table-ized A.I.
This ought to be tagged as coming from the "Lack of Redundancy Department"
Why do so many of those transatlantic cables seem to land in New York?
Two Reasons: Geography and Routing
1) Geography: First, the Guardian's map is a little oversimplified. Most of those cables come ashore in Eastern Long Island or along a relatively narrow stretch of New Jersey coastline, about 50 miles south of NYC proper. They're in those places because of submarine geography. The sea floor isn't flat- there are mountains and canyons, etc. Ever tried to run network cable through a crowded office? Pain in the neck, right? Now imagine doing it with six-foot long tweezers and a blindfold...for 3,000 miles. The cable-layers pick the flattest, least cluttered path they can. In the mid-1950s, we started to get good sonar maps of the North Atlantic sea floor. Laying undersea cable is *expensive*, and there was a big burst of it as those maps started to take the guesswork (and a lot of the risk) out of the equation. And once a company found a good route, they tended to keep using it.
Seafloor mapping:
http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/03fire/background/mapping/mapping.html
Timeline of transatlantic cables, 1951-2000:
http://www.atlantic-cable.com/Cables/CableTimeLine/index1951.htm
2) Routing. A *lot* of information passes through those cables. It's compressed (Hoffman encoding, anyone?), and at each end you have to decompress it and then route it back into the land line system. This is a big, complicated operation (Much more so in the '50s and '60s when so many of the US-Europe cables were laid), and it's cheaper to add capacity by laying more cables between existing terminals than to build new ones.
Overview of cable topography & operations for one big cable operator, Apollo Systems:
http://www.apollo-scs.com/networktopology/
Note that some companies (including Apollo) are starting to build new routes- the economics for doing that are getting better as cable gets cheaper and data traffic grows (shame on all the Americans downloading video files from peers in Sweden).
So yes, the undersea cable system *should* have much more redundancy, but it *won't* until somebody can make money building and selling that redundant capacity. And actually, these events will speed up that process; According to the Guardian, 50% of India's bandwidth is cut off. The people who own the pipes for the 50% that still works are having a *very* profitable week.
Is that since the cable cut my spam folders and inbox have been blessedly free of spam! I always say, you want to cut the crap with email and phishing, cutoff the net connections to Africa and Asia.
This explains why I haven't heard back from my Nigerian banker.
Have gnu, will travel.
We finally have an application for all those sharks with lasers.
Have gnu, will travel.
Last time I checked, bangladesh is WEST of the other affected places like India, etc. Sometimes I wish everything was a wiki.
Can the Lack Of Redundancy Department be guilty of a dupe? In order to be a genuine lack of redundancy, it would need to be The Redundancy, Lack thereof, As Pertains To The Lack Of Redundancy Department.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Wow are you serious? YOU are teach a lesson in semantics?
Calling someone crazy is name calling.
Calling someone a child not name calling?
Sorry, I guess you are going to have to dumb down that complicated semantic logic for me.
http://www.rinkermaterials.com/ProdsServices/Concrete/Conc_UnderwaterConcrete.shtml
It is the African Rift pulling apart, tightening and raising the cables to be caught by ships anchors. What is causing the African Rift to pull apart, is another question that can be answered. Crow.
This is widely *claimed* to be a mistake but that's the ideal cover for tapping the fiber, isn't it?
they were trying to tap the entire Middle East's internet traffic, since (imagine!) it all travels through a single choke-point...
Ask Me About... The 80's!
Thank you, great post!
Have you ever run up a HUGE: credit card, mortgage, gambling or - in other words - national DEBT?
Have you ever done everything in your power (legit or not) to get out, or delay the consequences, of that DEBT?
FIND: http://www.whatdoesitmean.com/index1067.htm for an intereting 'take' on the odd collapse of the internet in the MIDDLE EAST.
RR
-- as European banking traffic to the Emirates now has to flow all the way around the world the wrong way, and many of the intermediate carriers are choking on the traffic.
Now this feels like conspiracy from the US, as they have all the European Emirates/Asia traffic going thru US cables, to manipulate numbers and such in between. The value of the dollar is dropping at a rate the US cannot handle. Or maybe just to webify them causing slower connections might even do the trick.
When manipulating other countries you could deflate theirs, or inflate yours...
Subject: RE: 'Collapse' of the internet? An accident? Cui bono?
Have you ever run up HUGE (credit card, mortgage, utilities, gambling or - perchance - MONSTROUS 'national') DEBT?
Have you ever done everything in your power (legit or not) to get out, or delay the consequences, of that DEBT?
FIND: http://www.whatdoesitmean.com/index1067.htm [whatdoesitmean.com] for an interesting 'take' on the odd collapse of the internet in the MIDDLE EAST www 'failure'.
WAS IT DELIBERATELY DONE - TO PUNISH:
THE SAUDIS TO DELAY THEIR DUMPING OF U$D, plus
CRIPPLE OPEC for not increasing oil output and
other FINANCIAL issues ???
FIND AN 'OFFICIAL' VERSION AND SPIN:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/feb/01/internationalpersonalfinancebusiness.internet
Notice that the article DOES NOT INVITE READER COMMENTS - hence, no one with technical savvy or inside info can REFUTE OR CORRECT IT!
SEE THE WWW MAP - again!
http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-images/Technology/Pix/pictures/2008/02/01/SeaCableHi.jpg
INTERNET CUT
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/02/145231
Complete with the uusal: wit, pithy trolls, flamebaiters, disinfo artistes/agents, expert techies and deluded GUNG-HOs. LOL! OMG! Look 'HERE' not T-H-E-R-E!
Cui bono?
WHO BENEFITS?
RR
Agence France-Presse
Sun, 03 Feb 2008 18:57 EST
CAIRO - Damage to undersea Internet cables in the Mediterranean that hit business across the Middle East and South Asia was not caused by ships, Egypt's communications ministry said on Sunday, ruling out earlier reports.
The transport ministry added that footage recorded by onshore video cameras of the location of the cables showed no maritime traffic in the area when the cables were damaged.
'The ministry's maritime transport committee reviewed footage covering the period of 12 hours before and 12 hours after the cables were cut and no ships sailed the area,' a statement said.
'The area is also marked on maps as a no-go zone and it is therefore ruled out that the damage to the cables was caused by ships,' the statement added.
Two cables were damaged earlier this week in the Mediterranean sea and another off the coast of Dubai, causing widespread disruption to Internet and international telephone services in Egypt, Gulf Arab states and South Asia.
A fourth cable linking Qatar to the United Arab Emirates was damaged on Sunday causing yet more disruptions, telecommunication provider Qtel said.
Earlier reports said that the damage had been caused by ships that had been diverted off their usual route because of bad weather.
Egypt's communication and information technology ministry said it would report its findings to the owners of the two damaged Mediterranean cables, FLAG Telecom and SEA-ME-WE4.
A repair ship was expected to begin work to fix the two Mediterranean cables on Tuesday.
It's a Bagel.