BIG THREE INTERNET PHONE CABLES CUT IN MIDDLE EAST

Weather or not the cutting of three communications cables is an accident or a terrorist attack, it's an illustration of just how fragile and vulnerable the infrastructure of the West is, either by nature or by man. The fact of the matter is, that the more advanced and reliant on technology a country is, the more vulnerable it is to low tech sabotage by islamic terrorists.

Simultaneous attacks on several aspects of infrastructure such as electrical transmission lines, fuel pipe lines, roads, rail lines and communication system would wreak havoc over thousands of square miles and cripple the rest of the country. Such attacks can be carried out with simple low tech tools and equipment by rather small teams. Assuming three man teams, three attacks on each of the above systems, the total number of field operatives is only 45 grouped into 15 three man teams. Above these, there would be several layers of command and control that would equip, train, support and ultimately, send the teams out. So it might take less than 100 funded, dedicated individuals to shut down any industrialized nation. These attacks do not need to be totally successful on their own, they just need to spread chaos and fear and in toto, temporarily overwhelm the emergency responders.

Do Ya think there might just be 100 islamic terrorists in the West? (sarc off)

Any such coordinated attacks of a Western country by islamic terrorists would result in muslim upheavals in the rest of the world. If such a scenario were to unfold, other pious muslims (islamic terrorists) would come out from their "moderate" Mosques and join "The Grand Jihad" with their own home grown terror attacks. Just look at the rioting that has taken place when muslims are merely "insulted". There seems to be some sort of mass hysteria that sweeps the muslim world whenever the ummah is seen as being insulted.

FROM ATLASSHRUGS:

BIG THREE INTERNET PHONE CABLES CUT IN MIDDLE EAST

Hmmm, what are the bloodthirsty neanderthals planning now? Three of the four main cables cut.

Herb posted: I am currently in the Middle East and we have a 95% work stop state due to this outage. I cannot make any cell calls to the US and we are unable to keep our VPN connection up to the US (hat tip Randall)
According to BitGravity's backbone team, there are three major cable systems SMW3, SMW4 and FLAG FEA have all been cut near Alexandria.

Our CDN operations cannot be impacted from the cuts, but we monitor them anyway, thought this might be helpful:
SMW3: Fault Status: Suspected Problem in SWM3 between Alexandria and Mazara. Restoration of restorable bearers is currently in progress and non-restorable bearers are down.

SWM4: Fault Status: Suspecting some problem Problem in SWM4 Seg 4 between Alexandria and Marseille.
FLAG:Fault Status: FLAG FEA Cable system traffic between Alexandria (Egypt) and Palermo (Italy) is affected since 08:06GMT on dated 19th December 2008. Reliance Globalcom Marine team closely working with Alexandria & Palermo landing stations to investigate the fault and Reliance Globalcom is unable provide restoration because other cables SMW3 & SMW4 cables also failed on same segment about 07:50 GMT.
Posted by: Barrett Lyon | Dec 19, 2008 5:36:27 PM

Severed Cables in Mediterranean Disrupt Communication (Update4)
By Malcolm Fried and Lars Klemming

Dec. 19 (Bloomberg) -- Internet and telephone communications between the Middle East and Europe were disrupted after three undersea cables connecting Italy and Egypt in the Mediterranean Sea were damaged.
The failures cut the flow of “data of various kinds” between Europe and the Middle East, and there’s no timeframe for when communications will be restored, said Sanjeev Gaur, director of assurance at Reliance Globalcom Ltd. in India. France Telecom SA, which plans to send a maintenance boat to fix the problem, said the situation should be back to normal by Dec. 31.
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