Internet Services To & From India Affected

India has become the service provider of the world, and today most of the BPO's, Telecom Companies, IDC Operators (Like my company) and other Companies that process data for the world are disconnected. The reason is a cut in an Undersea Cable somewhere around Alexandria, Egypt. The downtime started at about 2PM IST (Jan 30, 2008), when we started noticing huge packet losses and high trip times between the US and India, and there was an estimated time to revive given for 8PM IST (Jan 30, 2008). Right now, News channels and News Papers, Online News Sites are screaming India is disconnected, to explain the situation below are some Graphs from Internet Traffic Report

First Up: Traffic Index Measurement to India (VSNL)


Second: Response Time to India (VSNL)


Third: Packet Loss to India (VSNL)


Some News References:
CBC Cananda
NDTV India
Reuters
Bloomberg
BBC

The first to report this was Headlines Today, in an article here

A few interesting traceroute's, that I can't share here for purposes of Privacy, show that this is a FLAG cable owned by Reliance, and Reliance is worst affected. ISP's which peer with Reliance, and service Providers (such as my company) are also affected. ISP's like Bharti and VSNL are partially affected, but affected non the less. It is estimated that the whole process will take anywhere between a week to 10 days to restore to normalcy.

Last time this happened was when an undersea cable around Hong Kong was cut in December 2006, to read the story from that time click here.

G