Damaged undersea cables disrupt Net services in India

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New Delhi, Jan 31: Internet connectivity in India and other Asian countries faced disruptions from a cut in two undersea Internet cables off Egypt’s coast on Thursday. More than half of the bandwidth was affected in India after the damage to the undersea cables. It will take more than a week to fix the damaged cables, which are affecting users in Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Bahrain as well. Israel was unaffected by the outages because its Internet traffic is connected to Europe through a different undersea cable. Lebanon and Iraq were also operating normally.

The biggest impact of the disruption will be in India as many US and other multinational companies outsource back-office operations including customer service call centres to the country. Major companies such as Infosys, Wipro, IBM and Intel, said they were still trying to asses how their operations had been impacted, if at all.

“The companies that serve the (US) East coast and the UK are worst affected. The delay is very bad in some cases. They have to arrange backup plans or they have to accept the poor quality until the fibre is restored,” said Rajesh Chharia, president, Internet Service Providers’ Association of India. While Chharia said some companies were re-routing their service through the Pacific route, bypassing the disrupted cables, a statement from the communications and IT ministry said speedy efforts are being made to restore the cable link.