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Civil Construction Wipes Out Internet Connectivity Across Africa (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Submarine cable operator Seacom has announced that civil construction activity was the cause of widespread outages which left large parts of Africa without internet connectivity yesterday. According to the firm, its Northern Trans-Egypt cable was damaged between Cairo and Alexandria, and the Southern Trans-Egypt route was also disrupted outside of Cairo. Adding to the interruption, Seacom's backup route, the West Africa Cable System (WACS), was also down at the same time, leaving most African countries without connectivity.
why I didn't get my daily dose of business proposals.
In other news, people over 65 have become increasingly worried as their correspondence with foreign princes has dropped to an all-time low.
Shouldn't they still have been able to reach addresses on their own continent?
Nigerian 419 scam spam fell by more than 90% following the outage...
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
This is clear evidence that the US is trying to kill Iran's petroleum market, one not tagged to the dollar. Petrodollars are the last thread holding up the fragile US economy before it falls off a cliff.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
Yes, provided they use DNS and routing tables inside the continent.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Previous such cutting of fibre links are thought to have been caused by spy agencies attaching taps to the cables. My guess is that, if not accidental, that is the cause here. Terrorist groups might gain some ideas from this though.
"Civil Construction Wipes Out Internet Connectivity Across Africa"
Sounds like some pretty uncivil construction, if you ask me. Hiyaaaaaaaaaaa! (puts on shades)
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Not clear any of this is relevant to the original topic, though. In your defense, I guess zombies are of more interest to most nerds than classic novels, or even Internet links in Africa.
Does anyone knoe if this knocked out phone links also (and, if not, why they use separate links)?
Remember a few years ago when all of the internet cables into Iran lost service "accidentally" at the same time?
I am wondering if a national intelligence service has decided to tap (or break) multiple cables at the same time for some reason--perhaps to prevent the deployment of more detection tech or development of more of a ready-response before they tap the next cable? Or perhaps as a feather in someone's cap.
Of course, it could just be coincidence. But that becomes less likely the more times we see multiple cables hit at the same time.
> if this knocked out phone links also (and, if not, why they use separate links)?
A lot of cables have been laid over decades. Phone cables first, of course, sized to provide 64kbps or less per active phone conversation. The latest cables might be sized for 20,000kbps per user. So an old cable could provide for either
A) 300,000 active international phone calls (30 million subscribers can have service available)
or
B) 1,000 people watching Netflix
If I'm running things, I'd use that last bit of bandwidth to continue phone service to 30 million people rather than let a thousand people watch Netflix.
I recall the story a friend of mine told me, when he was in charge of public works.
Workers came to him telling the found a huge cable while excavating. I answered "We asked for all authorization and they were granted, hence pull it off
Within 15 minute, the city was full of national telco branded cars, with workers opening manholes everywhere. He asked what was going on and was replied they had a major transatlantic link cut. It seems the maps were not up to date, and authorization to dig was granted on basis of wrong data.
Backhoe delay is still something sysadmins (or network admins today) need to factor into their calculations.
Some things never change. They may scale, but they don't change.
Your just silly if you think they are just now doing that. It has been in place likely since they were laid in the first place.
They don't need to cut the cables to listen in..... they just put the fibres in a Bend Tap, and it's completely non-disruptive and undetectable.
Wouldn't the proper way of describing this event be something more like "African portion of Internet splits away briefly?" My understanding is that the continent's infrastructure was separated from the rest of the global web, but that doesn't necessarily equal NO internet access. It's entirely possible many in South Africa and other countries barely noticed the disruption.
If North America's internet connections to other continents went down, we'd likely say that international services "went down" as many of us would still have access to everything we regularly access every day. I'd still be able to access Gmail, Netflix, my online services from most businesses, etc. We wouldn't be writing about how North America's internet "went down."
And choose to host sites inside the continent at much higher rates than hosting in foreign datacenters.
Trying to become famous by taking photos. Visit my homepage please.
I worked in the middle east, I was in my hotel one night and all of a sudden the internet stopped working and I could no longer do any work, after dicking around with my laptop trying to get the internet working again thinking it was my computer at fault, I finally gave up and called reception who said none of the outside lines or internet is working.
I went in early to the office to finish the work I was working on before my boss came in, The taxi driver had trouble finding a place to pull up because every van in the country that had a fiber splicer in the back was now parked outside my building with a bunch of poor guys scratching their heads trying to figure out where to begin... I quickly found out that my building and the other building in the country that hosts the diversity of their international links was broken into at the same time that night and the attacker hacked at all the links with a chain saw.
There was no internet, ATMs and many landline and mobile services did not work that day. The army came in to overtake the repair operations when it was noticed that the palace, bases and airports could not function correctly, and the local telco could not cope with the amount of repair work.
A meeting took place between military and the telco... (I got kicked out of the meeting room they used to hold the meeting) The army did not want to acknowledge that it was a terrorist attack publicly and the telco obviously did not want to cop the blame in the eyes of their customers and the country, so both parties agreed that the story would be that a configuration error on an "overseas upstream provider" caused the problem. That is how it was reported in the news.
I still don't understand why they wanted to keep it under wraps....
TLDR; "CIVIL CONSTRUCTION MY ASS"
I was trying to get $10,000 to a Nigerian heir of a murdered businessman in order to recover $10 MILLION at the time of the outage!!!!
I will probably never have such a great opportunity again!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Flamebait? Somebody clearly didn't get the joke.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Attending a recent presentation on "Risk and Impact of a Communications Outage" speaker mentioned there is more and more construction crews accidentally cutting cables. Also with fiber able to carry more bandwidth than copper, less fiber cables can be laid. Unlike in the old days of slow baud rates many more copper lines had to be laid. There were also microwave links. So back then if someone cuts a cable, the impacted area is smaller than it is now. With a single fiber carrying much more, cutting that one fiber will result in many more than cutting a single copper line back in the days (though less lines means less chance getting cut by a backhoe?). I remember the days, "Dial Before You Dig."
mfwright@batnet.com
interesting point.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.