A few months ago, we lost network connectivity with the rest of the world for a few days, (but we did have backups running). It was frustrating and since then the government and private firms have built up redundant cables/connections so that this does not happen again. However the usual critics went ahead and screamed out that such a thing could only happen in Pakistan.

Well guess what, this time it happened in India. And Egypt, and the whole of the Middle East. Update: Pakistan is affected as well but not as badly. 60% of India’s internet users (cosumers, private firms,etc) were impacted and Verizon said in a statement that they have had customer support issues since their Indian offices went down. (Hmmmm familiar?) As per the New York Times : “Some of our customers were impacted” by the damaged cables on Wednesday morning until the company rerouted traffic, said Linda Laughlin, a spokeswoman for Verizon.

No news on the cause or when this will get repaired, It will take several days atleast. As per BBC it was a ship’s anchor that brought India’s multi-billion dollar IT industry’s network connectivity to its knees. By now I’m sure alot of the issues have been resolved and re-routed through backups. Go figure. I think in our case it was probably something as silly!

So there. Shit happens. You deal with it and get over it and keep moving on. Whats important is serving your customers with on time service and ensuring that when this stuff happens you are ready for it. When it hit us, we were. Next time someone says we had a big huge gap in connectivity and the Pakistani IT industry’s service level is unreliable, etc etc blah bleh, send them a link to this post

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