Internet Disrupts Across Asia: Issues with SMW3, SMW4 + Flag [update]

Submarine Cables that are responsible for Internet and telephone communications between the Asia and Europe are reportedly cut down between Italy and Egypt in the Mediterranean Sea.

In this mysterious activity (can be co-incidence as well) all three major undersea cables called SE-ME-WE3, SE-ME-WE4 and flag got damaged today. The failures cut the flow of internet and voice data between Europe and Asia, and there’s no time frame for when communications will be restored, reported bloomberg.

Slow browsing; poor throughput and high latency problems are being experienced throughout Gulf, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka and neighboring countries.

For most of the countries, including Pakistan, traffic has been routed now via east bound.

Bloomberg further reports that priority will be to recover the SEA-ME-WE 4 cable, then the SEA-ME-WE 3 cable. There is information from France Telecom that Sea Me We4 could be operating by Dec. 25 and that the situation should be back to normal by Dec. 31.

Businesses, especially online one, call centers, BPOs and others are likely to be badly hit by this outage, which were already undergoing severe economic downfall these days.

The SMW4 cable, also known as SEA-ME-WE 4or South East Asia- Middle East-Western Europe 4 cable network, connects 12 countries: Pakistan, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Italy and France.