You may recall the disruption of Internet service to India and the Middle East which caused a great deal of consternation (but little practical degradation of off-shored services) last January/February, the result of four different undersea cable problems which had conspiracy theorists abuzz. I've been interested in the story since it seemed very much a near miss for the IT off-shoring industry and received relatively little recognition as such, so I've kept an ear to the ground to see if anyone could come up with some explanations for an otherwise freakishly unlikely coincidence.

The Khaleej Times is now reporting that the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the principality primarily affected by at least two of the cable disruptions, has impounded two vessels deemed responsible for the problems. Both vessels (one Korean and the other Iraqi flagged) are alleged to have dragged anchor and caught the cables in the process.

There are a number of things which aren't clear from the story, which may be translation problems or perhaps the difficulty of explaining nautical matters to lubber reporters. One is that the explanation provided for how the damage was caused seems odd; the Iraqi vessel apparently tangled their anchor in one of the cables and then cut it loose, and the problem is being attributed to their doing the proper thing (cutting the rode rather than continuing to yank away at the fouled anchor). Another is that there is no explanation provided for the Korean ship becoming similarly fouled. Finally, there is no mention at all of how this may or may not fit in with the two other cable problems the same week, which were initially attributed to dragging anchors, but later found to have occurred in areas where no ships were present.

I'm glad to see someone reporting on the matter again, because the fragility of these few undersea linkages and the enormous challenges maintaining and repairing them is a significant matter for IT outsourcing businesses running off-shore. But I'm afraid with so little evidence as to what actually occurred, I'm going to have to stick with my ninja theory for now.