Four have been cut so far. Two near Egypt, another off Dubai, and a fourth cable between the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. Conspiracy?
One particularly imaginative theory is that a US submarine severed the cables in order to cut off internet service to Iran. Another is that it’s all a ruse to distract attention from a big wire-tapping effort.
Four severed cables does seem beyond the possibility of coincidence, but who would benefit and why?
DailyWireless has an comprehensive overview of the outages.
No more coincidental than Israel’s increased, as if it were possible, bellicosity towards Iran and the Iranian dorse set to replace the American dollar as principle exchange for petro/oil purchases next week.
While it’s entirely possible some nefarious plot is in progress, beware of false information. This morning on a list I’m on an email came across informing us all that Internet service was completely down. Which came as a surprise to me, since I regularly check the Iranian News Service (http://www.irna.ir/en/) and Press TV (http://www.presstv.ir), both of which are completely functional and not even slow.
DailyWireless mentioned Iran was the most badly affected while Rough Type said the big companies in India had redundant routes and are ok while small companies aren’t.
So, possibly the Iran sites have redundant routes or some of their servers are in other countries.
Hard to know what’s happening.