On 30 January 2008, news agencies reported Internet services were widely disrupted in the Middle East and in the Indian subcontinent following damage to the SEA-ME-WE 4 and FLAG Telecom cables in the Mediterranean Sea.
The Egyptian Maritime Transport Ministry reviewed one day of complete video footage beginning 12 hours before and through 12 hours after the service disruption, concluding the cause of damage was not surface craft as no ships were traced sailing through the area of the alleged wire damage.
[19][20] On 1 February 2008, VSNL, a leading communications solutions provider in India, confirmed that the company restored a majority of its IP connectivity into the MENA region within 24 hours of the Egypt cable breakdown.
[21] Two days after the initial break, it was reported that the FALCON cable was cut between Muscat, Oman and Dubai, UAE.
[1] On 19 December 2008 France Telecom issued a press release stating that the FLAG Telecom, SEA-ME-WE 4, and SEA-ME-WE 3 cables, linking Alexandria, Egypt, Sicily, and Malta, had been cut by either bad weather conditions or a ship's anchor, resulting in substantial slowdowns in communication traffic, with Egypt experiencing an overall 80% reduction in Internet capacity.
Interoute director Jonathan Wright stated that "You can reroute the data through other cables, but that increases traffic and can potentially create bottlenecks, so Internet connections may slow down and some phone calls could get disrupted.
[9] However, FLAG Telecom indicated that the cut to the Falcon cable between the United Arab Emirates and Oman was caused by an abandoned anchor weighing five to six tons.
[28] According to Stephen Beckert, a senior analyst at TeleGeography, the events are far less exceptional than they seem because cable cuts happen all the time.
[33] According to Global Marine Systems, "Undersea cable damage is hardly rare—indeed, more than 50 repair operations were mounted in the Atlantic alone last year".
[36][37][38][18] On 6 February, theories that the disruption in these cables was related to an economic confrontation between the United States and Iran appeared in an opinion piece on Dow Jones Marketwatch.
[39] This article points out that the disruption or damage to these cables preceded the intended launch of the Iranian oil bourse on Kish Island between 1 and 11 February.
The UN agency's head of development, Sami al-Murshed was quoted, "We do not want to preempt the results of ongoing investigations, but we do not rule out that a deliberate act of sabotage caused the damage to the undersea cables over two weeks ago.
"[42] This was subsequently shown false, as on April 18, two ships parked in a restricted area during a storm, cutting the cables with their anchors.