RSSMiddle East Internet outage questions
For a story with such import as that of the four cut cables affecting traffic to the Middle East and the Indian sub-continent in January and early February this year there sure has been very little follow-up. I hadn't heard anything about it for a few weeks so I went and did a quick Google News search, and turned up only this puff piece from The Gulf Daily News, out of Bahrain, honoring the cable repair crews who quickly located and fixed a number of the cables.
Those folks deserve their due and I am certain that the repair job would make an interesting story in and of itself, but there is absolutely nothing else out there about what happened to those cables. If the original incidents weren't suspicious enough (and I am not one of those who subscribes to any conspiracy theories on the matter), the fact that there has been nothing else about it since should raise some eyebrows.
I realize that nothing is likely to have been printed if nothing compelling was found about the cause of the cuts, but I would have thought that simply the act of retrieving and repairing the cable ends would have yielded some newsworthy information; were the clean breaks, ragged cuts, tension fractures? Russian flags? There must have been something about the cuts that one could draw some conclusions from, even if those conclusions were completely innocuous. Has anyone out there heard anything further about this? The absence of even a PR whitewash in the aftermath is interesting.
