Some people are starting to call this a “wake up call” because of the simplicity of the attack and the magnitude of the impact.

Apparently a ship is blamed for dragging its anchor across an undersea cable early this morning, causing widespread outages to Internet and voice traffic in Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

Renesys has a blog with some excellent details:

As you can see from the above map, there are several cable systems that connect Europe, the Middle East and Asia, via the Suez Canal. The countries highlighted in red are those whose Internet connectivity is being disrupted the most by this event. At Renesys, we geo-locate all routed networks and observe their reachability from over 250 locations around the globe. In the case of disasters like this, we will suddenly see a large percentage and/or a large number of country-specific networks disappear from the Internet. As the following charts show, Egypt and Pakistan lost the highest percentage of their networks, while India lost the least. However, India had the third highest total number of networks disappear. Looking at the cable map, it is not surprising that the Indian subcontinent was impacted by events off the coast of Egypt. There are essentially two ways to get to this part of the world: via the Suez Canal or via Southeast Asia.

Pakistan and Egypt report outages of seventy percent or more. I have been working on a number of projects with offices in Asia. None appear directly affected by this incident, but obviously we’re taking another hard look at redundancy requirements.