In a statement, France Telecom reported that the "Sea Me We 4" cable was cut at 7:28 AM local time, the "Sea Me We3" was severed at 7:33 AM, and the FLAG cable was severed at 8:06 AM. While a repair boat is en route, full service is not expected to be restored until Dec. 31.
The causes of the cuts were not known at press time, although boat anchors have been blamed for previous outages. The cable runs between Alexandria, Egypt, and Sicily.
France Telecom estimated that 82 percent of India was without service as of Friday; major Middle East nations such as Saudi Arabia were 55 percent out of service, while Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Taiwan were 52 percent, 68 percent and 39 percent out of service, respectively. The list of affected nations also included Lebanon, Malaysia, the Maldives (which was completely without service), Pakistan, Qatar, Syria, Yemen, and Zambia.
Keynote Systems also confirmed the outages.
"Keynote maintains a global network of more than 3,000 performance measurement systems, at 115 locations, in 59 countries," Shawn White, director of external operations for Keynote, said in an emailed statement. "We have measurement systems in India (Bangalore, Chennai, Mumbai, and New Delhi) representing the largest incumbent ISPs there, VSNL and Sify. Unfortunately, we do not have any public data for performance measurement data from the Middle East; though, we do have a measurement system in The United Arab Emirates (Dubai).
"According to our data, between 12/18 @ 10:45pm and 12/19 @ 5:00am (PST) the average network response time between India and the rest of the world slowed by as much as 3x to 4x of normal," White added. "During this same period, network availability dropped to between to between 83% and 93% and at one point, near midnight (PST) as low as 72%. After 5:00am (PST), network performance and availability returned to "almost" normal with periodic slowdowns and availability drops. At 9:00am (PST) and continuing as I write this update, we saw some average network response times slow by 2x on some networks and availability drop to approximately 96 percent."
Most of the errors appeared to be network outages, producing TCP connection errors and TCP connect timeout messages which often indicate significant packet loss between Keynote's measurement systems and the Web sites they access, White said.
France Telecom ordered one of the two maintenance boats based in the Mediterranean area to cast off at 3:00 AM local time on a repiar mission, towing 20 km of spare undersea cable. By Christmas, the Sea Me We 4 cable could be operational, France Telecom said.
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