The undersea cables that carry the vast majority of Internet data between continents have often been seen as potential weak links in the system; expensive to install, complicated to troubleshoot and fix, few in number, they are a natural chokepoint for the flow of information between centers of commerce.

With yesterday's unexpected severing of a major cable connecting Africa and the Indian sub-continent with Europe, we may be seeing the first real test of the Internet's resilience, and correspondingly the first real test of corporate operations in the era of heavy off-shore outsourcing. While the bulk of the outage appears to be affecting the Middle East, with corresponding problems for the financial powerhouses in Dubai, Qutar, and the United Arab Emirates, it also is reported to have nearly halved India's bandwidth capacity, leaving India-based outsourcing firms scrambling to find alternate routes for their traffic.

Surprisingly, the Internet seems to be holding up remarkably well this morning; Internet Traffic Report shows heavy slowdowns outside of North America, but nothing in the red. Traffic is slow, but still moving. While this may be affecting certain services and processes (it's too early for any real reports), it's probably not cutting anything off entirely. Individual reports from India are not encouraging; but so far I haven't seen any major outsourcing companies, or their customers, claiming major disruptions over the matter.

The real issue may be the length of time it takes to repair the cable. Although, having been damaged by a ship's anchor, the problem must be in relatively shallow waters, the complexity of undersea cable repair could leave the line out of commission for a month.