On Wednesday, Internet traffic to Middle Eastern countries through two international data pipelines was greatly reduced or totally severed, as a result of breaks in undersea cables.

Countries serviced by the Sea Me We 4 and FLAG ("Fiber-optic Link Around the Globe") data pipelines were severely affected by what are believed to be undersea breaks.

Egypt was the first to report almost total connectivity loss of both data and voice service. Since then, its systems have been back up to about 40% capacity, according to the Egyptian Telecommunications Minister. Though the country anticipates a return to 75% of normal within 48 hours, traffic will most certainly be reduced for weeks.

Sea Me We 4 is a 24,500 mile long pipeline maintained by a consortium of telecommunications companies that runs from Germany, through the Middle East, around India, all the way to Australia and Japan. It has been operational since November 2005. The break in that particular cable has been reported to be in the Mediterranean Sea between Palermo, Italy and Alexandria, Egypt.

The break in FLAG, the telecom project parented by the Reliance Group, India's largest business house, is reportedly off the coast off of Marseille, France.

Countries affected most by the severance, as calculated by global Internet monitoring service Renesys, are: Algeria, Egypt, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Maldives, Syria, Lebanon, Kuwait, The United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Pakistan, and India.

A trade group in India, the Internet Service Provider's Association, reported a 50-60% drop in bandwidth there. The global impact of a disconnected India could be severe, as many global corporations have all their back office services outsourced there. This means reduced connectivity to call centers, legal, insurance and healthcare transcription, research, collections, and credit processing.

The layout of countries affected by today's service breaks is literally historic, since today's data cable routes through the Middle East and North Africa parallel the trade routes upon which empires were established, back when the most valuable commodities were more physical than virtual.

Before World War I, Admiral of the British fleet, Lord Fisher, cited the importance of five strategic locations on the globe: Singapore, The Cape (Capetown), Alexandria (Suez), Gibraltar, and Dover. He referred to these as the "Five keys [that] lock up the world."

Alexander Harrowell remarked today on the message board of the North American Network Operators Group that these five points remain strategically important today, because of the landing stations where these international undersea cables intersect. The paths that international data traffic take today remain heavily rooted in the paths of colonial conquest of the 15th century British empire. "The similarity," Harrowell wrote, "is truly uncanny."