Large swathes of Asia, the Middle East and north Africa had their high-technology services crippled Thursday following a widespread Internet failure which brought many businesses to a standstill and left others struggling to cope.

One major telecommunications provider blamed the outage, which started Wednesday, on a major undersea cable failure in the Mediterranean.

There were contradictory reports on the real cause behind the disruption, but Du, a state-owned Dubai telecom provider, attributed it to an undersea cable cut between Alexandria, Egypt and Palermo, Italy.

Besides the Internet, the outage caused major disruption to television and phone services, creating chaos for the UAE's public and private sectors.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/01/31/dubai.outage/index.html

The future?

The only question I asked myself was...how insanely minded were the telecommunication companies as well as service providers to be all completely defendant on one telecommunication's cable? Why have they not diversified their sources...all right lets say it was because they wanted to save money but after a period of time they are supposed to diversify were the signals come from (*satellites...*new high gain antennas...*new countries*....*new cables)

I also have a slight feeling that this was a man-kind cause distress due cause trouble in Asia in due to major market chaos in the World. It seemed that of all Asian market recovered the quickest, well "someone" decided otherwise it seems.