Internet users in India, especially the outsourcing industry, struggled with impaired Internet access on account of the breakdown of two undersea cables in the Mediterranean. An anchoring ship off Egypt’s Alexandria coast damaged Reliance group-owned FLAG cable, and also SEA-ME-WE on Wednesday morning.

Due to a storm near Alexandria coast some ships were ordered to anchor immediately, which resulted in damage to undersea cables. FLAG Telecom Group Limited, a subsidiary of Reliance Communications Limited, owns and operates undersea cable system spanning 65,000 route kilometers and four continents. When contacted, the company declined to make any comment. However, a reliable source from Reliance Communication informed, "We have many BPO and call centres as clients but they will not be severely affected as we have already diverted traffic to other centres." Repair teams have already left for the site, however, the repair will take around 10 days, informed the Reliance official.

Business and personal usage across a wide swathe of the Middle East was interrupted. In Cairo, the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology stated that the cut in the global communications cable had resulted in a partial disruption of Internet services and other telecommunications across much of Egypt.

As mentioned in The Associated Press, Rajesh Chharia, president of the Internet Service Providers' Association of India informed, "Information-technology companies, software companies and call centres that provide online services to the UK or the US East Coast are the worst affected. Some of them are re-routing through the Pacific as a backup, but the voice quality and speed of traffic will be highly degraded," he said, adding this solution left operators with half their normal bandwidth.

Anwer Bagdadi, Senior VP, CTO, CFC India, Financial Services informed Biztech2.0 that India is surrounded by a host of network terminals. India has landing points at Cochin and other places. The cable breakdown will affect the traffic that is solely dependent on that cable. CFC India runs several BPO and contact centres across India. The company relies on SEA-ME-WE 3 cable and also has a shadow link so that traffic is run on both the Atlantic and the pacific routes. Bagdadi feels that Indian companies and service providers must have a continuity plan so that they can route the traffic to a shadow link or to another geographical location in case of contingencies.

When contacted Prasad Dhumal, National Information System Manager, DHL Express who runs contact centres in India informed that they have not been affected by the incident as they had planned in advance for such contingencies.

Bagdadi claimed that the areas of Gulf and northern Africa have been facing such issues of cable breakdown, prior to this incident as well, due to geo-political issues. Bagdadi concluded, "If the network is well planned, then the conditions can be brought under control quickly."