Its the weekend and time to relax. So here I am surfing the Net – and what do I find?

Imagine this scenario – what would happen to our social networking endeavors if we all lost connection to the Internet? Some of you may have been following Afterworld, the first television series to be made available on mobile phones and the web simultaneously (each of the 130 episodes is just over two minutes long). This animated sci-fi series tells the story of life on earth after an inexplicable global event which renders technology useless.

More than 95% of international telephone and data traffic travels via undersea cables. So sometimes there is an accident! What does happen when something goes wrong?

Passport reports:

The Arabist, an anonymous blogger based in Egypt, sarcastically predicts “complete social breakdown” when people find themselves unable to update Facebook every few minutes. Here’s hoping it doesn’t come to that. Internet users from Cairo to Calcutta are either without the Web or their service is operating at a fraction of its normal capacity.

The culprit? A ship off the coast of Alexandria, Egypt, dragged its anchor and snagged two major underwater telecommunications cables. Unfortunately for Internet addicts in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Pakistan, and India, the SeaMeWe-4 and FLAG Europe-Asia cables, which carry the majority of Internet service between Western Europe and the Middle East and South Asia, were the ones cut.

Unfortunately for Internet addicts in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Pakistan, and India, the SeaMeWe-4 and FLAG Europe-Asia cables, which carry the majority of Internet service between Western Europe and the Middle East and South Asia, were the ones cut.

It’s happened before, and will happen again. Passport explains that it’s unclear when normal service could be restored to the affected countries. I wonder how blogger Julie Lindsay is managing in Doha? and if she still has steady access.

Oh, I see she is in Prague ……  and busy blogging about the ECIS conference! I recommend a visit to the slides of her presentation on Personal Learning Networks. She captures the key points beautifully.

Below: damaged cable networks

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