Yesterday, a greater part of Asia, the Middle East and North Africa returned to the 1950’s, literally, at least from a business and technological point of view.
High-end telecommunications, TV reception, phone and Internet services went dark leaving thousands of businesses and companies scrambling and unable to communicate with one another across the globe, sending panic to some financial circles. Fortunately air travel thorughout the huge region was not affected by the outage.
The culprit turned out to be an accidental cut in a strategic Mediterranean undersea cable leading to a massive Internet and telecom outage. The situation is being investigated but preliminary reports are blaming the anchor of a huge frieghter for the cut in the cable.
Many in the region suffered a total loss or greatly diminished Internet bandwidth including countries like India, Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Bahrain. Hardest hit was Dubai, the rising star in the Middle East crown of hi-tech dependency.
However, countries like Israel, Iraq and Lebanon were spared due to their use of extensive and strategic Plan B satellite backup.
Many in the Asian and Middle East telecomminications world are now citing this as proof of just how fragile current world markets and companies have become who rely totally on just one high tech method to do business, store data and communicate in an ever shrinking world fraught with both natural and man-made mishaps.
I sure hope Nigeria was affected…I’d love to give my Spam filter a rest.
“Asia, the Middle East and North Africa returned to the 1950’s, literally”
I think you mean, “metaphorically”, not “literally”. I doubt that there’s a time machine large enough to transport such a large chunk of earth back to the 50s.
I smell a movie here.