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."

Send Them a Bill

[Detritus]

They should follow the example of the telephone company. Find the owners of the ships and send them a bill for the repair costs. That will get their attention.

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

[iamacat]

But the Internet has become too centralized for even basic self-healing envisioned by TCP/IP researchers. Egypt is not an island and should have had many smaller capacity links to it's neighbors as well as satellite connections run by different companies. Every ISP and phone company in the world should have an agreement to provide emergency routing outside the usual patterns.

I was hoping the news would be "cable cut, millions of surfers notice a slowdown in streaming video".

Everything into NYC?

[thesolo]

Looking at the east coast of the US of the linked picture, it appears as though every single underseas line is going into New York City, with only a few also extending to Miami. Why is the east coast so non-redundant? Especially given NYC's recent history of being a prime target for terrorism, it seems as though you'd want lines also going into other major urban centers on the east coast, such as Washington DC, Boston, Philadelphia, etc.

Does anyone know of a reason it's all being piped into New York?

Ireland in Peril

[Doc Ruby]

There's only a single cable on that map connecting Ireland to the Internet. The English Channel has lots of shipping. That seems like something the Irish government would want to get fixed right away. Maybe another cable to Britain.

Or better yet, a cable to France, for not just geographical diversity but also geopolitical diversity. A cable to the Netherlands would give even better interconnectedness.

And of course it would be even better if that connection landed somewhere else than Dublin, so there's no failure bottleneck point.

Any extra cables would also increase Ireland's overall Internet bandwidth. As that country climbs out of the Industrial Age (and really the Farming Age), it'll need more than one cable. Especially if it doesn't want to get squeezed by some "bottleneck master".

Are Sea Cables "Abandoned & Salvageable"?

[Zymergy]

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

These cables DO contain valuable metals in them like copper, aluminum, and steel (probably stainless)? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_communications_cable [wikipedia.org]
(I do realize that some of the recent cable cuts are not in international waters, but is still is an interesting query.)
I am not endorsing any harm of, nor the "salvaging" of any undersea cabling.
However, there are many, many others in the world who do not have the same sense of right and wrong (and virtually all of these examples are NOT in International Waters.)
http://www.google.com/search?num=50&hl=en&safe=off&q=wire+theft+copper+aluminum&btnG=Search [google.com]

"Tha facts have come out:"

[cicho]

The article has this to say on the cause of the damage:

"According to reports, the internet blackout, which has left 75 million people with only limited access, was caused by a ship that tried to moor off the coast of Egypt in bad weather on Wednesday."

According to whose reports? Published where? What was the name of the ship? How was it discovered that it caused all the damage? Is the same ship also responsible for the third cable cut, which did not occur in the Mediterranean, and later than Wednesday?

This what you refer to as "facts". I sure hope you intended sarcasm.

Re:Let's nip this one in the bud

[cicho]

Nobody needs to splice an undersea cable if they can go to AT&T and every other telco company and get what they want by idnetifying thnselves as the government and kindly asking, on dry land. For the US, the telco immunity bill seems to be a done deal: http://firedoglake.com/2008/02/01/dems-capitulate-on-fisa/ [firedoglake.com]

designed to survive nuclear war

[peter303]

The InterNet's parent, the military ArpaNet, was designed with no head or center, in order to survive a major war. Root name servers are a bit of a weeakness. But wayward ships and elementary school hackers seem have a good shot too.

Re:Huh

[cheater512]

Look at Australia for the moment.
We have one line going from Brisbane to Hawaii and another from Sydney to New Zealand.
They are both part of the same network.

A few years back one of the cables got cut while the other was under maintenance.
All our internet was routed through the two western cables.

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.

Fast forward to today with high speed broadband and about 90 million people affected.
Yes data will be re-routed but it will probably be faster to snail mail Google asking for your search query.