Submarine data routes in crisis

By Tim Conneally, BetaNews

February 1, 2008, 4:20 PM

Day two of the Eastern hemisphere's widespread Internet outage has seen an incremental worsening of the situation as another submarine cable is severed.

Today, another Flag Telecom cable, known as FALCON, was reported to have snapped, this time some 35 miles (56 km) off the coast of Dubai. FALCON was the first privately-owned multi-terabit cable to reach the west coast of India, celebrating its completion in 2005.

Initial reports early this morning from Reuters said that India's Internet capacity had climbed back to about 80% by diverting traffic to different routes. But there is no report now from the country's service providers yet as to how this third severance is affecting the flow of data.

The effects, however, are already showing here in the United States. Bank of America, for example,which has outsourced much of its back office work to India, posted a message today warning users of slowed traffic.

---

---

Many of the largest Fortune 100 corporations have huge amounts of back office work taking place in India. Global investment bank Goldman Sachs uses Indian outsourcing companies, Cisco houses its biggest research and development facility outside of the US in India, and brokerage firm Edward Jones outsources much of its IT work there. While they may not each suffer tremendously, the collective slowdown has the potential to impede many upcoming business exchanges.

Attempts by BetaNews to contact certain outsourcing groups in India, unsurprisingly, have been unsuccessful.

Flag Telecom reported to the BBC that two repair ships have been dispatched to the break sites, but will not arrive for several days, and repair is expected to take around a week.