The recent outage in the Middle East caused by breaks in undersea fiber optic cables has sparked a lot of conspiracy-theory type rumors. Some were comical, such as the sharks with lasers; others were insane such as a Dept. of Defense cover-up. The general assumption was accidental breakage, especially after a large anchor was found next to one of the lines. Now thanks to a U.N. official, the rumors are starting to circulate once again.
The recent outage in the Middle East caused by breaks in undersea fiber optic cables has sparked a lot of conspiracy-theory type rumors. Some were comical, such as the sharks with lasers; others were insane such as a Dept. of Defense cover-up. Now thanks to a U.N. official, the rumors are starting to circulate once again. (IMG: DL Ritter)
It all started several weeks ago. This is when service was lost to south Asia and parts of the Middle East, when two sections of cables near Egypt’s northern coast were broken. The breaks caused outages in most of UAE, later to be followed by the breaks in the cables between Oman and Dubai.
After the cables were repaired, rumors started to fly about how they were cut in the first place. Sabotage was mentioned repeatedly, but eventually died off. While some rumors were funny, such as Chuck Norris taking heat for the outage, others were pure FUD. The fear mongering in the IT press blamed Al Qaeda, pointing to the outage as a trial run for the mass shutdown of U.S. communication networks. Even those rumors started to die, but now thanks to Sami al-Murshed, an official with the U.N.-backed International Telecommunication Union, those rumors are back.
While it is unclear whether or not tinfoil sales have started to rise, the quote given to the Agence France-Presse by al-Murshed is not going to help the rumor mill.
“We do not rule out that a deliberate act of sabotage caused the damage to the undersea cables over two weeks ago. Some experts doubt the prevailing view that the cables were cut by accident, especially as the cables lie at great depths under the sea and are not passed over by ships.”
Did anyone hear rumors about hackers with subs? Otherwise, those same “great depths” would in all honesty prevent sabotage. Sharks with lasers aside, how could a team of people, without a submersible of some type, get down that deep to cut the cables? If they did manage to get a submersible down there, they would have been noticed.
The likely cause was the anchor found by one of the cables and another object similar to that as the cause for the other cuts. Weather can play a part in outages too. In 2006, there was another outage, caused by a 7.1 scale earthquake, which took out nine underwater cables between the Philippines and Taiwan. The result was a loss of connection between Southeast Asia and the rest of the globe. After the earthquake, it was another fifty days before service was restored completely.
Unless someone harnessed the power of the weather. The government can do that you know.
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