DoSomeTalking

It was a cold and rainy Thursday. January 31st.

I got a call from our branch in India at 09:15 AM . “We don’t have internet”, they said.

“Cannot be”, I replied. “Restart your computer”.

But the word started spreading around noon. Two under water cables were cut. The internet in the middle east and India severely damaged. It was official.

48 hours later, a third cable is gone. Speculations as for the reason started arising. Stephan Beckert, an analyst with TeleGeography asserted:

“…A preliminary investigation links the cuts to a ship’s anchor that dragged and ripped into the two fiber optic undersea cables.”

But a quick investigation conducted by the Egypt’s Ministry of Communications concluded:

“A marine transport committee investigated the traffic of ships in the area, 12 hours before and after the malfunction, where the cables are located to figure out the possibility of being cut by a passing vessel and found out there were no passing ships at that time“.

24 hours passed and a forth cable is gone. This got me curious so I started an investigation of my own.

I managed to put my hands on some under water cable maps and pinpointed the location of the break down (circled):

I used these coordinates, pulled some strings with friends in the army and managed to get this satellite image, taken at the exact time the cables were torn (I circled the location):

I noticed something funny. There was something there. A dot out of place. Thought it might have been a glitch in the picture, a satellite malfunction of sort, so I asked for a close up image. Again, location circled:

Still unable to understand what I was looking at, I reverted to Flickr, searching for images uploaded via mobile, from proximate locations. I found this one. Fishing vacation it appears:

Nothing out of place. Kept on looking and found another. Again - fishing at sea:

Again - nothing.

I’m still trying to contact the people taking the pictures. I know they have mobiles with them, since that’s where the images came from, but there’s no answer. Probably forget packing battery chargers.

So there. Nothing.

Suppose it was an anchor after all. Greek Maybe?

Update: It seems there’s no end to this story. A fifth cable is gone. I called the Operations Dept. in FLAG Telecom, the company who owns the cables. It seems they have cameras along the line. They sent me a photo (below) taken around 17:30 yesterday (Wednesday). Funny looking fish are swimming there, but I guess that’s how it is in the deep.