Other related documents and commentary:

• How one clumsy ship cut off the web for 75 million people: “A flotilla of ships may have been dispatched to reinstate the broken submarine cable that has left the Middle East and India struggling to communicate with the rest of the world, but it took just one vessel to inflict the damage that brought down the internet for millions.”
• The internet’s undersea world – “The vast majority of the world’s communications are not carried by satellites but by an altogether older technology; cables under the earth’s oceans. As a ship accidentally wipes out Asia’s net access, this map shows how we rely on collections of wires of less than 10cm diameter to link us all together.”
• Effects of Fibre Outage through Mediterranean, by Les Cottrell and Qasim Lone [both of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center]: “On January 31st, 2008, the NY Times, BBC, The Guardian, CNN and many others reported undersea cable cuts in the Mediterranean. One was damaged near Alexandria, Egypt, and another in the waters off Marseille, France. The two cables were damaged within hours of each other on Wednesday morning of January 30th 2008. Operators believe the damage was caused by ship’s anchors during a heavy storm at sea. One of the cables, Sea Me We 4, is owned by 16 telecommunications companies along its route. The second cable, known as the Flag (for Fiber-optic Link Around the Globe) System, runs from Britain to Japan. The cables are separately managed and operated. The outages mainly affected the Middle East and Asia. Most disrupted communications were quickly rerouted through the remaining SEAMEW3 cable or fibres taking the other way around the globe. The cables involved are shown in the Telegeography map below. There are also world maps from Telegeography and Alcatel.”