How One Clumsy Ship Caused A Major Net Outtage

Ant writes "Here is an interesting world map of various Internet connections, showing how it took just one vessel to inflict the damage that brought down the internet for millions."

3rd cable cut

[vivekg]

So far they found 3 cable cuts. According to this BBC article http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/-/2/hi/technology/7222536.stm [bbc.co.uk] - A third submarine internet cable is severed in the Middle East, compounding global net problems.

I don't get it

[JoeCommodore]

Sure you can see from the map they pulled the cables way too tight, but given the line width those things must be like 2 to 5 miles wide. :-)

Seriously as previous slashdot postings, one or two accidents may be a coincidence but three within a few weeks sounds more like a pattern.

Should be: How bad network design...

[ZWithaPGGB]

Caused by politics and telco monopolies created a network without redundancy. A combination of the infeasibility, due to the political situation, of overland links through the middle east and central Asia, and the hidebound Indian telco not providing sufficient redundancy in connections out of the country, never mind the total misallocation of resources inside it, are the cause of this. TCP/IP is specifically designed to recover from link outages, if it doesn't, you've got an improperly designed and/or operated (statically, as opposed to dynamically, routed) network.

Good news for US and European IT workers though: that buffoon who offshored your jobs has to explain why the IT department has been down for a few days. I guarantee the CEO/CFO is not amused that he can't get to SAP, or that the stores can't upload, or that whatever other mission critical system is off-line isn't working.

Re:... is due to change dramatically ...

[ColdWetDog]

Does anyone know what they mean by this?

Not me. The whole stupid article was a whole stupid article. One ship hit all three cables? Which ship? TFA attests that a ship's anchor hit hit the cable(s). No affirmation. Nothing. No wonder we don't read the damn articles.

IIRC, the first two cables cut were 22 km apart. That's a pretty good anchor drag. Not saying it's impossible - it's a big, wide ocean with lots of aging freighters run by crews that likely had to be brought on ship via the crane.

I would still like to see the money here.

For the record, I still think Bush did it.

Re:3rd cable cut

[Skreems]

How reliable is that site? Because it also claims that Colombia and part of Germany are completely absent from the internet...

Re:I don't get it

[LrdDimwit]

If you look at the actual map (the most interesting part to me), you see that in other parts of the world, the cables do this nice fanning out process -- the undersea cables between New York and Japan, for instance -- but because of the way the continents of Africa and Europe are arranged, they pretty much have to run a whole bunch of cables cables thru a narrow strait. This is a rough time of year for weather, and the aftermath of the first incident just means more traffic is added to that route (as people investigate, try to fix it, etc). So the first accident might have made it more likely for the subsequent ones to happen.

Re:Everything into NYC?

[grumling]

Newfoundland to Ireland.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telegraph_cable [wikipedia.org]

There is also a natural shelf along most of the route.

Re:Cables not buried properly

[Anonymous Coward]

It is not the ship's fault. The cable installer should have buried them properly.

Underwater cables are not buried, except near land. Once you get away from land they lie loose on the seabed.

Re:Now, I am not talking about nuclear attacks...

[hcdejong]

True, but that ignores the economic reality, and a few more factors.
1. We're talking about (relatively) poor countries, so the budget for massively redundant infrastructure simply isn't there.
2. Cables across land are easy when the region you go through is politically stable. It's another matter when there's a war going on. For example, Egypt shares borders with Sudan, and a cable going West from Egypt would cross Algeria.
3. Cables across hundreds of km of undeveloped desert aren't cheap to install or maintain. It's much easier along existing infrastructure, but even then it's an expensive business.
4. Items 1 and 3 combined mean that you'll get a few high-capacity links instead of multiple smaller-capacity links.
5. The telecom tradition of 100% uptime is typical of first-world countries. In Africa, people tend to be more accepting of the occasional outage. See #1.

Also, how much redundancy is enough? Currently, Egypt has 3 major links (FLAG, SEA-ME-WE 3 and SEA-ME-WE 4) to Europe, and 3 (the same cables) to Asia. They're all separated, so a single incident would take out (ballpark) 1/6 of their bandwidth. Severing 3 cables in one week falls under 'shit happens', IMO.

Re:What?!?!

[NiceGeek]

I've been boycotting "LOST" ever since it came on the air...hoo-boy what a stinker.

Re:Send Them a Bill

[Tablizer]

Ships/captains plying international waters must have up-to-date info. If they damage a cable that is on the maps, they are responsible.

Some speculate based on weather in the area that they were just trying to stabilize themselves in a storm so that they didn't drift into solid structures. It may come down to bits versus human lives.
           

Bush?

[KZigurs]

I thought it was CIA or whatever name they are doing their secret operations under now screwing up major:
1) existing splices rerouted thru existing infrastructure
2) one of links fail
3) splices give up and sever connection as it cannot be reliably copied anymore...

Re:Are Sea Cables "Abandoned & Salvageable"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems like under Maritime Law, items abandoned/sunk/lost on the sea floor in International Waters are subject to being recoverable and salvageable?

Underwater cables are not abandoned, sunk or lost. They are deliberately placed and in active use.

These cables DO contain valuable metals in them like copper, aluminum, and steel (probably stainless)?

The resale value of underwater cable is pretty low - who will you sell it to? There aren't that many underwater cable owners, and they don't want to encourage theft.

As scrap metal, the cost of separating the copper, aluminum & steel from the rest of the cable will be high.

Re:Huh

[pclminion]

Do you realize how slow it was? Dialup was severely affected and if you got 1kbps you were very lucky. Thats just for a small 20million person country back in the day when everyone didn't have net.

We've become so spoiled. Bandwidth has made us lazy. Why, 1 kbps is basically a 9600 bps modem. I used to do practical things on the Internet as those speeds. Just getting on your average web site these days would take too long for comfort. And what do we get in exchange? A lot of flashy graphics and advertisements.

Oh well.

Re:Huh

[pev]

We've become so spoiled. Bandwidth has made us lazy. Why, 1 kbps is basically a 9600 bps modem. I used to do practical things on the Internet as those speeds.

We used to get by using postal mail delivered by hand and taking weeks to get between countries. People got practical things done then. Of course now peoples systems and methodologies have adapted to the 'current' ways of working making it impractical to 'go back' for many.