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?
