Internet outage hits Yemen

This is the view that many internet users in Yemen have been seeing more frequently.

An internet outage affecting all internet users swept across Yemen last Saturday. The outage started at 11 a.m. Sana’a local time; 8 a.m. GMT.

The outage severely affected the media and journalists that depend on the internet  in their daily work as a means of communication or for publishing their news on websites.

Ishtar Fuad, communications officer at the Yemen Observer said she kept trying to update the website from 11 am to 7 pm but couldn’t. “We have high speed internet service, ADSL, but the internet was so slow  that I couldn’t even open a page,” said Ishtar.

The outage caused big losses for the owners of internet cafes across the country. “Many customers tried to get access to the internet but could not, so they left without paying,” said Gamal Abdullah, owner of an internet café on al-Tahreer street in downtown Sana’a. “I have 45 computers which are usually occupied by internet users 24 hours [a day]. The rent of shops in downtown Sana’a is very expensive, so this outage represented a big loss for me,” said Abdullah.

Ahmad al-Shahithi, an internet user, said he tried for almost 4 hours to send an email to his brother in Cairo, but failed. “ I could not even open my email. I tried four different internet cafes in different areas of Sana’a but could not get access to my email,” said al-Shahithi.

Sami Taher, a journalist, said he could not send his news story and pictures to his newspaper. 

”I tried to send the story and pictures from my home but could not, at first I thought it was a virus infecting my laptop that I could not open my email or any internet page, but when I tried to do that from other internet accesses I realized there was something wrong with the internet provider. 

In the past three weeks several newspapers have complained of not being able to update their websites, to discover later that it was the result of technical faults from the ISP.  

Damaged undersea cables resulted in a break in communications felt around the globe.

These days, Yemen has had many problems with communications via the internet caused by damage to four major undersea cables in the Mediterranean Sea, which has been disrupting internet and telecommunication services in a number of Arab Gulf states and Asian countries including Yemen, which first received internet service in 1996. These disruptions interrupted technological life and paralyzed business facilities last month, beginning on Wednesday, January 30, 2008, resulting in problems which have still not been fully resolved.

Preliminary information indicates that the damage to the cables was caused by the collision of a ship in the Mediterranean Sea with two major cables linking Italy to the Arab Republic of Egypt which caused the surrounding countries to be affected. 

The two damaged cables are the FLAG Europe-Asia cable, operated by FLAG Telecom, and SeaMeWe-4 (South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe-4), a consortium cable owned jointly by fifteen telecommunication companies. These two cables account for the majority of international communication between Europe and the Middle East.

The Yemen Observer tried several times to contact the Ministry of Telecommunications to find out what the protocol was in the case of cable disruptions in the Middle East, particularly Yemen, but there was no response.  

Monitoring of the situation revealed that the impact of the rapid drop in service caused an imbalance in the navigation speed of websites in Bahrain, which forced the company of Bahrain Telecommunications to transfer all of its services and move backup communication networks to alleviate the pressure.

The company confirmed that the telecommunications sector in Bahrain were slightly affected because of this imbalance and that it needed more than seven days to repair the problem. 

In Kuwait, the Undersecretary of the Ministry of Communications, Abdul Aziz Osaimi, told al-Watan Kuwait newspaper that Kuwait suffered from a paralysis in the area of communications with the Western world via the internet, pointing out that this disruption was due to the collision of the ship in the Mediterranean Sea with the undersea cable to Egypt and the resulting disruption in the connection with the neighboring regions via the Red Sea to Kuwaiti regional waters.   He pointed out that his country, as well as others in the region, suffered from significant problems regarding lack of contact with the western world.

The Saudi Arabia Communications and Information Technology body also announced a malfunction in internet services which took several days to repair; they worked with service companies to find quick solutions and alternatives to dealing with the problem.

The Egyptian Ministry of Communications also said that the sudden drop in internet services in Egypt caused partial interruption of services, reaching 70 percent of the network at the level of the Republic. According to its statement, the ministry said that it did not know why the cable broke or whether the reason was due to the weather.

In addition, India reported a significant breakdown in its services, reaching anywhere from 50 to 60 percent.

The disruption of these cables has impacted businesses and banks in numerous countries. Telecommunication services and financial transactions conducted by some websites through banks and financial companies on the internet have also been hindered. 

A senior official at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) announced that sabotage is unlikely to be behind the break in the maritime communications cables in the Mediterranean and the Gulf. ITU clarified that they do not run the investigations, but they are encouraged to do so.

The Director of Telecommunications Development Bureau, Sami al-Bashir, said that the bureau is awaiting the results of the research, and does not want to assume foul play is involved. They are not, however, ruling out an act of sabotage as the cause of the incidents.

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