Living without Facebook

Damage to undersea Internet cables hit business across the Middle-East and South Asia on Thursday, including the vital call centre industry, prompting calls for people to limit their surfing.

India's Internet-dependent outsourcing industry was also severely disrupted, with businesses saying it may take up to 15 days to return to normal.

"Information-technology companies, software companies and call centres that provide online services to the UK or the US East Coast are the worst affected," said Rajesh Chharia, president of the ISP' Association of India. India's 11 billion dollar outsourcing industry employs 700,000 people working for companies that deliver services ranging from answering-queries to to analysing-equity.

Bangladesh was also hit, with an official from the state Telegraph and Telephone Board saying that voice and data traffic bound for Europe and America is not working. Another Bangladesh provider, BDcom, said it was running at a quarter of its usual capacity. Sri Lanka also faced a drastic drop in service quality, according to Sri Lanka Telecom, the country's largest Internet service provider.

Around 70% of Internet users in Egypt have been affected since two submarine cables in the Mediterranean Sea were damaged on Wednesday. Like India, Egypt has a major call centre industry which has been affected by the outage, with a telecommunications ministry statement saying productivity was down to 30%.

Egyptian blogger The Arabist said he would "resume posting after the problem is resolved" and predicted, with a hint of sarcasm, "complete social breakdown in vast swathes of (upmarket Cairo districts) Heliopolis and Mohandiseen as thousands are unable to update their Facebook status."

Bahrain's Batelco issued a statement appealing for people to limit use to browsing and email but to refrain from file-sharing applications which require more bandwidth. Gas-rich Qatar said that less than 40 percent of its Internet services were affected but that international phone lines were functioning normally.

Saudi-Telecom reported the loss of more than 50 percent of its international lines, and said it did not know when normal service would be restored.

Via AFP