Internet Outage in the Middle East

Early last Wednesday, much of the Middle East was completely cut off from the Internet due to damage done to two undersea cables near Alexandria, Egypt. On Friday, a third cable had been damaged off the coast of the United Arab Emirates. One of the main ISPs, DU, was completely cut off. This outage led to disruptions in business and telecommunications across much of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar also experienced disruptions or slow Internet.

By early afternoon on Wednesday, the ISP had found alternate routes, but an official from the customer care department of DU said “there is slowness while browsing on the Internet.”

In the United Arab Emirates, businesses were faced with two week s of outages. Repair ships were expected to arrive at the site of one of the cable’s damages on Tuesday, February 5^th. The operator of the other cable planned to carry out repairs on Friday, February 8^th. However, bad weather has held up the repair of these cables, and the Middle East is still

And what if that were to happen in the U.S.?

Over the last decade, The Internet has rapidly developed from new-fangled contraption into something that many of us can’t live without. With online shopping, e-mail and managing one’s bank account online, it has certainly made our lives easier. For college students, research is much less hassle and it also gives all of us a wonderful way to keep in touch…and waste our time (hello, Facebook).

The Pew Internet & American Life Project studied the average Internet use of American college students, and found that three-quarters of college students use the Internet for four or more hours per week, while one-fifth uses it for 12 or more hours per week. This is significantly higher than the amount of time most students spend studying.

According to Matt Miller, Technical Specialist at Ursinus College Information Technology, the Ursinus network has gone down before, usually because of reasons beyond the control of Computing Services. Although he says that the likelihood of such a thing happening is very small, there is a chance. The service runs from here to Philadelphia, so there is always the chance that someone could hit the wrong telephone pole.

Perhaps we Ursinus students should begin to lessen our dependence on the Internet. One never knows...

For more information, visit these sites:

Gabe's Blog
ArabianBusiness.com