And, why were they cut? An interesting analysis of the effects of the cut or damaged undersea cables is available, and conspiracy theories about the reason for this event begin to emerge.
There is no way that the damage to four undersea cables in the same region of the world is a coincidence. Well, OK, maybe it is a coincidence. But there may be a connection. One suggestion is that these cables were cut in preparation for an invasion of Iran, or at least, the insertion of special forces to carry out some covert activity. What a dumb idea that is. Another possibility is that the weather in the region caused lots of boats to go dragging around their anchors, snapping cables. That's also a dumb idea, because if that were true, this sort of thing would happen more often. Go here to see RageBot's take on the conspiracy angles.
Meanwhile, it is quite possible to measure the effects of these cable outages in a number of ways. Personally, I compared the pattern of user access to scienceblogs.com for a period of time before the cable damage and during the few days when this was all happening. It is against our policies to discuss these sort of numbers, so I can't tell you what I discovered, but I think I can safely summarize it his way: No effect was clearly obvious except possibly one. Iran went from an incredibly low frequency of visiting scienceblogs.com to a much lower number.
But there is a very nice analysis available, with pretty pictures and all. Here's one of the pretty pictures:
This shows the frequency of lost data packages at an internet host in the United Arab Emirates for just under 15 hours at the time of one of the cable cuts. Looks a little like the Younger Dryas to me.
This study, which is very detailed and very interesting, can be found here.
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Not sure an idea being dumb rules out our administration trying it, but OK...
Anyway it occurred to me that Islamists may have cut the cables because they didn't like them there internets. A bad influence on their constituents or something.
Will be interested to find out what really happened, if we can.
It is against our policies to discuss these sort of numbers, so I can't tell you what I discovered
So . . . what exactly are you trying to hide?
Quickly! To the conspiracy generator!
What seems to me the most obvious reason doesn't seem to have occured to you - that the cables were cut so that they could be tapped by an intelligence agency.
Catman: That was kinda my point...
Has anyone presented a map showing the locations of these cables?
Yes, I have, somewhere on this very site.
(although I did not make the map, I took it from somewhere on the internet)
Enter cable in the search box on the left..