Is this the end of WWW or the World?
Major Disruption to Traffic in Middle East/North Africa
A major loss of connectivity, reducing overall bandwidth to a crawl with very high latency, is currently affecting most of the Middle East and parts of North Africa and the Indian sub-continent.
The disruption started at around 07:30 GMT and has continued ever since. This is affecting all traffic in and out of the region – particularly SMTP.
Typical TTL to the US and Europe is currently around 1800ms on Broadband and 800ms on Tier 1 – compared to 180ms and 90ms respectively under normal conditions.
We have not yet been able to establish the reason – although it is likely to be a cable breakage somewhere between the Middle East and Europe.
If anyone here has any news on the subject, or is also experiencing regionalised outages (we know parts of southern Europe have some connectivity issues) let us know.
Update: It is now confirmed that 3 out of the 4 fibre cables that connect the Middle East, North Africa and Indian sub-continent to Europe and US have been cut.
These cables carry around 90% of the Internet and Voice communications to these areas, and will take considerable time to repair. On the last occassion (early 2008) it took almost 1 month to repair.
In the build up to Christmas this will serverely affect eCommerce and Call Center activity – this will also affect hosting companies with customers in these regions which will not be able to access their servers/hosting accounts.
The affected cable providers are FLAG, SMW3 and SMW4.
I’m not seeing anything major on the Internet Traffic Report website, but there is a noticeable increase in latency being recorded:
http://www.internettrafficreport.com/
The 7 day graph also shows a slight drop in traffic and an increase in latency:
http://www.internettrafficreport.com/7day.htm
I’m knocked out! I don’t know what am I going to do without internet! This failure has effected my ISP and my browsing speed has been reduced by almost 3 times! 🙁 I got this update yesterday from my ISP about this international failure and this is a 100% confirmed news from a well known source.
Now what can this internet failure do? This can make the economy condition worse! and if I’m not mistaken, it will also effect the stock exchange in the next 72 hours since companies/call centers depend on the internet for their over seas business and trade. The stock exchange might see a down fall by almost 30-50%! It also means that this Xmas might not be as good as it was last year 🙁
If you get any more updates about this do post them below in the comments and I’ll update the post as soon as possible!
So is this the end of WWW or the World?
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10 Comments Add yours
December 19, 2008
11:50 pm #comment-1
OMG! Website Snow! I haven’t seen a website with snow since the 90s!
December 20, 2008
4:52 am #comment-2
OMG! I was totally going to comment on the cool snow too! How funny … I had not heard about the outage … that’s crazy! If I hear more I will post here too … and I’ll check back to see what others have found out. S
December 20, 2008
6:44 am #comment-3
That most of had been an experience for you. Not having internet, no communication to the outside world. It really helps to understand how far and dependent we have become of technology.
Now, here is a questions: I have dsl and I have issued with the company out here, its slow, or sometimes they have the nerve to do repairs during my working hours. I know T1 is faster, would you think investing in the T1 service would help avoid these situations? Of course I would like to have T1, down the road…………….. 🙂
December 20, 2008
7:56 am #comment-4
It all depends on you.. If your using the internet to make money and you can afford it – Go ahead with it 😉 I use broadband and I’m on a 0.25 MBPS connection.. Though it isn’t fast enough but its good enough for me to surf the net and chat with friends 🙂
December 22, 2008
7:48 am #comment-5
There really seems to be a problem with the wiring thing..
I’m in india and i’m experiencing a drop in my bandwidth since 2 days.. i’m using a 2mbps connection but my downloads happenin at a rate of 20-30 KB/s max!! 🙁
December 22, 2008
12:11 pm #comment-6
Isn’t that speed enough for you to steal my articles and then dare to comment back here? Just add the source link before I report to your host 🙂
December 23, 2008
5:43 am #comment-7
Getting low internet speed, whole India is facing it!
December 23, 2008
10:52 am #comment-8
Except Sify.. 😀 Sify has switched over to satellites in india.. 😀 My internet is on FULL SPEED now.. But it gets disconnected sometimes for like 10-15 seconds 😉
May 17, 2011
8:31 pm #comment-9
I’ll tell you this much, I would die without the internet ;p Great post!
January 27, 2012
7:23 pm #comment-10
Awesome! I live with internet ;D