Internet "Disruption": A Dry Run By Terrorists?

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Feb 2, 2008, 10:30:49 AM2/2/08

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When two cables that carry Internet traffic under the Mediterranean
Sea were "cut" Wednesday (Jan. 30), India suffered the most
disruptions to its commercial businesses of any nation. But other
countries also experienced slowdowns ranging from minor to "alarming."

Most involved seem so far to be rushing to a judgment of
"accidental."

But short of valid answers, some are speculating that the "accident"
might not have been that at all, but perhaps was the work of
terrorists in a test of "What If?"

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"Rare Cable Rupture 'a Wake-Up Call' for India"

By Emily Wax
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, February 2, 2008; A12

NEW DELHI, Feb. 1 -- In the heart of an industrial zone and up an
ordinary flight of stairs, young computer engineers buzzed with
activity Friday in front of a huge screen tracking Internet
connectivity in this country's booming service sector.

When Internet traffic slowed to a crawl late Wednesday after two
cables were cut beneath the Mediterranean Sea, the ability of service
providers such as this one to quickly reroute data became crucial for
India's hundreds of outsourcing companies. Without such expertise,
those companies would be unable to communicate with clients around the
world.

"It's looking better," said R.S. Perhar, chief operations officer of
Tulip IT Services, as the movie screen-size map indicated improving
connectivity with flashes of green. "We are going to beat this because
we had backup options. But it was a wake-up call."

The fiber-optic cables that carry data around the world have been
damaged before. But experts said the simultaneous rupture of two
underwater cables, reportedly caused by a ship's anchor 12 miles off
the coast of Egypt, was rare, and served to highlight the
vulnerability of the global information technology system.

Although India was hit particularly hard by the disruption in Internet
service, countries in the Middle East and elsewhere in Asia were also
affected. Saudi Telecom issued a statement to local service providers
explaining that the slowdown had been caused by problems "outside the
kingdom." Zain Kuwait, a mobile telecommunications firm, received
thousands of calls from customers complaining about slow Internet and
BlackBerry service, according to chief executive Barrak al-Sabeeh.

The overall disruptions worldwide were limited because large
businesses that use heavy bandwidth were able to use backup cables or
other means of access, including satellite connections. Perhar, the
Tulip executive, who is also secretary of the Internet Services
Providers' Association of India, said all companies, large and small,
should make sure they have options and lobby for more cables.

"Most of the larger companies know that you have to have multiple
layers of the Internet to do business on the world stage. Indian
companies have learned their lessons to have backups during past
breakdowns," said Raja Varadarajan, executive vice president of
Quatrro, a company that provides technical support to computer users
in the United States. "We are talking about millions of dollars and
jobs. What we want is to have such a good setup that the only way we
find out there was a slowdown is by reading it in the papers the next
day."

Other companies, meanwhile, may have learned the hard way. In addition
to India's small outsourcing companies, travel and matrimonial sites
and the country's railway ticketing system were affected by the cable
snag.

The Hindustan Times was unable to carry stock pages because of
technical problems. The newspaper ran a cartoon showing young call
center workers sleeping at their desks with cobwebs growing over their
computers.

"I'm just helpless without the Net, and this just shows you how the
world can't live without it anymore," said Ravi Shekhar Pandey, a
technology expert at Springboard Research, an IT market research firm
in New Delhi. "The Internet has become like water."

Pandey said his neck ached and he was feeling crabby because his
sluggish connection was preventing him from sending out a report. (The
report, ironically, was on South Asia's strong software outsourcing
market.) His wife was also annoyed, he said, because she couldn't
access her favorite parenting Web sites.

By the end of the day Friday, Internet service here was back to about
80 percent of its regular speed.

At Tulip's offices -- where the logo reads: "Our clients swear by us.
Not at us." -- Perhar was double-checking the company's fiber-optic
connections. The three humming cases stuffed with wires seemed to be
working. He took a deep breath.

(Special correspondent Faiza Saleh Ambah in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia,
contributed to this report.)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/01/AR2008020103078.html