Cable Cut Fever Grips the Web

Are underseas telecom cable cuts the new IEDs?

After two underwater cable cuts in the Middle East last week severely impacted countries from Dubai to India, alert netizens voiced suspicions that someone -- most likely Al Qaeda -- intentionally severed the cables for their own nefarious purposes, or that the U.S. cut them as a lead-in to an attack on Iran.

[From Cable Cut Fever Grips the Web | Threat Level from Wired.com]

Well, yeah! What's the web without some good, old fashioned paranoia?
They go on to claim that on average a cable is cut every 3 days, and that there are 25 ships (in the world?) that do nothing but fix cables. What I find the most amazing is the lack of people asking why the hell we still use cables instead of satellite signals.

Fifth Undersea Cable Cut

[From Fifth Undersea Cable Cut - Underwater bogeyman continues secret mission... - dslreports.com]

Can you spell tinfoil hat? I can. So can Slashdot.

The funny thing is how hard it is to find two news sources reporting a consistent breakdown of what is broken and which countries are affected. Or even make a distinction between cables that were actually cut and cables that are suffering outages due to the traffic rerouting.