India's lucrative outsourcing industry contended with Internet slowdowns and outages Thursday after two cables were cut under the Mediterranean Sea, disrupting Web access across a wide swath of Asia and the Middle East, according to The Associated Press. The disruption cost India half its bandwidth. While larger companies with sophisticated backups appeared equipped to handle the situation, smaller firms said they could lose business if full Internet access was not quickly restored. «Most of our work ... consultation with our overseas customers, is done online. The Internet is our main business tool,» said Praveen Mathur of Streit India Advisory Services Pvt. Ltd., an investment consulting firm that is based in New Delhi and has clients in the United States and Canada. The firm's business, he said, would «definitely be affected» if the problem persisted. The outage also raised questions about the system's vulnerability. A Gulf analyst called it a «wake-up call,» while one in London cautioned that no one, including the West, was immune to such disruptions. They could have a «massive impact on businesses,» said Alex Burmaster from Nielsen Online in London, adding that ordinary people «probably couldn't imagine» life without the Internet. Such large-scale disruptions are rare but not unknown. East Asia suffered nearly two months of outages and slow service after an earthquake damaged undersea cables near Taiwan in 2006. The Mediterranean Sea cables, which lie north of the Egyptian port of Alexandria, snapped Wednesday as the work day was ending in India. The impact was not immediately apparent there, but it was in Middle Eastern countries. There, outages slowed traffic on Dubai's stock exchange and left officials scrambling to reroute traffic to satellites and through Asia. Dubai's stock exchange was back up by Thursday, but many Middle Eastern businesses were still having trouble _ as were ones in India, where the Internet was sluggish. Some users were unable to connect at all and others were left frustrated by spotty service. The Internet Service Providers' Association of India said the country had lost half its bandwidth, and TeleGeography, a U.S. research group that tracks submarine cables, said the disruption reduced the capacity on the route from the Mideast to Europe by 75 percent.
