CAIRO, Egypt - Internet outages disrupted business and personal usage across a wide swathe of the Middle East on Wednesday after an undersea cable in the Mediterranean was damaged, government officials and Internet service providers said.
In Cairo, the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology said the cut in the international communications cable had led to a partial disruption of Internet services and other telecommunications across much of Egypt.
Emergency teams were quickly trying to find alternative routes, including satellite connections, to end the disruptions, Minister Tariq Kamel said. But service was still slow or nonexistent by late afternoon Wednesday.
A telecommunications expert at the Egyptian communications ministry, Rafaat Hindy, said the government was "engaged in efforts to try and overcome the consequences of the problem" but cautioned that "solving this could take days."
"Despite this being an international cable affecting many Gulf and Arab countries, we are closest to it and so we have a lot of responsibility," he said. "We are working as fast as we can."
Internet service also was disrupted in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, which markets itself as a top Mideast business and luxury tourist hub. Both Internet service providers said international telephone service was also affected.
One of the ISPs, DU, was completely down in the morning; browsing remained very slow even after DU restored Internet service by the afternoon.
DU attributed the disruption to a fault in "two international cable systems" in the Mediterranean Sea but gave no details.
An official who works in the customer care department of DU blamed a fault on a submarine cable located between Alexandria, Egypt, and Palermo, Italy.
It was not clear what caused the damage to the cable.
The official, who identified himself only as Hamed because he said he was not authorized to speak publicly, said he could not describe the technical fault but that engineers contracted by DU were working to solve the problem.
By early afternoon, the service was flooded with complaints and had found alternative routes but Hamed said "there is slowness while browsing on the Internet."
There was no total outage in Kuwait, but service was interrupted Tuesday and Wednesday. The Gulfnet International Company apologized in an e-mail Wednesday to its customers for the "degraded performance in Internet browsing."
In Saudi Arabia, some users said Internet was functioning fine but others said it was slow or totally down.
A staffer at a Saudi ISP said that they were told that a cable rupture was the cause of the problem, which began early Wednesday. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media. Calls to Saudi Telecom went unanswered Wednesday afternoon, the start of the weekend in Saudi Arabia.
Users in Bahrain and Qatar also complained of slow Internet.
