Millions of people across the Middle East and Asia have lost access to the internet after two undersea cables in the Mediterranean suffered severe damage .
internet
million people middle east asia lose access internet undersea cable mediterranean suffer severe damage
Millions of people across the Middle East and Asia have lost access to the <m> internet </m> after two undersea cables in the Mediterranean suffered severe damage .
India suffers massive internet disruption after undersea cables break
Millions of people across the Middle East and Asia have lost access to the <m> internet </m> after two undersea cables in the Mediterranean suffered severe damage .
Huge numbers in Egypt and India were left struggling to get online as a result of the outage , when the major internet pipeline between Egypt and Italy was cut .
Internet Service Providers ( ISPs ) throughout the region , including those in United Arab Emirates , Kuwait and Saudi Arabia , also reported problems .
International telephone calls , which have also been affected , are being rerouted to work around the problem .
Industry experts told The Times that two sub-sea cables went down just off Alexandra , causing the mass disruption .
`` It is incredibly rare to experience a dual-break where both cables are down simultaneously , '' said a spokesperson for Interoute , the internet networks company .
The Egyptian ministry said it will take `` several days '' for cables to be repaired and is trying to reroute Egypt 's internet connections .
Indian ISPs said their problems were due to the cable damage off Egypt .
Speaking to reporters , Rajesh Chharia , president of the Internet Service Providers ' Association of India , said : `` Information technology companies , software companies and call centres that provide online services to the UK or the US east coast are the worst affected . ''
Rafaat Hindy , from the Egyptian ministry , said : `` Despite this being an international cable affecting many Gulf and Arab countries , we are closest to it and so we have a lot of responsibility .
`` We are working as fast as we can . ''
It is thought that up to 70 per cent of web services in Egypt , and 60 per cent in India , were disrupted yesterday .
There were reports that phone and internet difficults had spread to Yemen , Sudan , Bangladesh and Sri Lanka .
The shut down will take several days to fix , and could have a major impact on the region and across the world .
It is likely to hit businesses who will struggle to communicate in the affected countires .
Call-centres who work for British companies are likely to be offline or hard to contact in the coming days .
Others warned that bank and stock market trading could be affected .
The digital blackout highlighted the vulnerability of global communications .
Hundreds of millions of people access the web , but the vast majority of international traffic runs through a a small amount of cables submerged below the sea .
Industry insiders warned that a domino effect was occuring today , causing the disruption to spread across the globe .
As companies ' private internet services went down , workers were forced to use the public internet and mobile phones to communicate .
This has resulted in a heavy strain on phone and internet networks , meaning calls could go down and cause the internet to become slower or blackout completely .