A ship’s anchor lying at the bottom of the sea was behind one of two cuts last week in undersea Web cables around the Middle East that caused dramatic outages across the region and in parts of Asia, the cable-owner company said Friday.

FLAG Telecom said its repair ship managed to recover one end of the cut FALCON cable in the Persian Gulf, 56 kilometers (35 miles) north of Dubai, amidst the Emirates and Oman.

At the site, FLAG’s repair crew discovered an abandoned anchor which the company said was behind the cut last Friday. The anchor, weighing more than 5 metric tons (5.5 U.S. tons), was pulled to the surface.

It was not immediately clear whether FLAG had any indication what vessel the anchor belonged to, or how such a heavy anchor could have moved to snap the cable or whether the cable itself was drifting and why.

At the day of the cut — the second in three days and involving

three separate Net cables — rough weather was reported in that part of the Gulf.

The strange cuts led to disruptions in services, slowed businesses and hampered personal World Wide Web usage. They plus caused a flurry of World Wide Web blogger speculation, including mentions of sabotage — allegations authorities and FLAG have refused to comment on.

“It is difficult to comment right now on that,” said a FLAG spokesman reached by the telephone. “We are doing our own examination.” He spoke on condition of anonymity, in line with company policy.

Ovum analyst Matt Walker said undersea cable networks are highly vulnerable to planned attack and need enhanced safety measure.

“If ports, railways, gas pipelines and other types of networks are being secured against possible sabotage, we must similarly increase the defense of undersea optical highways,” said Walker.

The cuts plus underlined potential threats that disrupted World Wide Web connectivity could pose to…

Orginal post by Top Tech News