Undersea cable operators have a nasty habit of laying cables close to each other. When they get cut, they tend to go in sets. The first question I have is why Maldives would lose 100% of traffic when it is connected by two undersea cables, one to Colombo and the other to India. That’s serious redundancy, especially for a tiny country of 300,000+ people. I can understand the traffic on Reliance’s Flag system going down because it was Atlantic focused. But most of Sri Lanka’s Internet traffic runs west via the Pacific. The very fact that I am posting this is evidence that Sri Lanka’s connectivity to the US is unaffected.
So it is possible that Dhiraagu was unaffected. Can readers from the Maldives shed some light on what actually happened. Second mystery is why Taiwan is affected from a Mediterranean cable cut, when it is practically the gateway for the Pacific cables.
Most business-to-business traffic between Europe and Asia was being rerouted through the United States, the firm said, but regular communications between Europe and several Asian countries has been disrupted since early Friday.
Sixty-five per cent of traffic to India was down, while services to Singapore, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Taiwan and Pakistan were also severely affected, a spokesman said Friday evening.
An afternoon toll released by France Telecom said that 100 percent of traffic was lost in the Maldives Indian Ocean islands, with the Gulf state of Qatar and Djibouti, on the Gulf of Aden, also losing over 70 percent of their traffic.
The full story from LBO.
1 Comment
raditha
As at the 24th of December, Three cables seem to have been repaired but the FLAG cable the one that Lanka Bell normally uses is still in two pieces. Worse still the repair ship hasn’t even arrived in the vicinity. At the moment bell is routing through VSNL.