Last week the fragility of the internet was exposed by massive outages in the Middle East and on the Indian subcontinent. After two high speed data cables from Europe to Asia were cut some countries lost 70% of their capacity for internet traffic. Iran seems to have lost all of its connection.

Some initial reports said the problem was just with one cable. Now at least three are down and it hasn’t taken much for the internet conspiracy theories to get going.

Initially blame was placed on a ship’s anchor for severing two lines – FLAG Europe-Asia and SeaMeWe4. However the Egyptian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology said right after the cuts happened that the cables were over two kilometres away from each other, meaning one ship is unlikely to have caused both breaks (press release 1). Now the ministry says no ships were even in the area where the cables were cut (press release 2).

Soon after the news of problems with the first two cables, FLAG Telecom reported another cable, called Falcon, which connects countries in the Middle East was cut some 56 kilometres off the UAE (press release PDF).

There are also reports of a problem with a fourth cable. USA Today was running a story headlined 4th undersea cable damaged — conspiracy or coincidence? But this now seems to have vanished from their website. However local sources say this cable was taken offline for power reasons not because it was cut and there was no disruption to the internet.

Time for another application of Hanlon’s Razor methinks.

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Graphic of undersea cables

UPDATE

A fifth cable is now reported down. The Daily Tech says:

However, by several accounts, the fifth cable cut is actually a second cut on a different segment of the FALCON cable. How exactly these cables are being cut is still unknown, though Egyptian officials maintain a ship didn’t cause the breakages near the port of Alexandria.

Image: Getty