In the News: Internet Outages Hit India, Middle East

Jan 31, 9:25 AM (ET)

By MATTHEW ROSENBERG

NEW DELHI (AP) - India's lucrative outsourcing industry struggled Thursday to overcome Internet slowdowns and outages after cuts in two undersea cables sliced the country's bandwidth in half.

The disruption - which has hit a swath of users from Egypt to Bangladesh - began to affect much of the Middle East on Wednesday, when outages caused a slowdown in traffic on Dubai's stock exchange.

Such large-scale disruptions are rare but not unknown. East Asia suffered nearly two months of outages and slow service after an earthquake damaged undersea cables near Taiwan in December 2006.

The cables, which lie off the coast of Egypt in the Mediterranean, were snapped as the working day was ending in India on Wednesday and the impact was not immediately apparent

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