Two undersea cables carrying Internet traffic snapped in the Mediterranean Sea Wednesday, causing slowdown and outage in the Middle East and South Asia. This caused the internet service to be reduced by 50 percent in Egypt and by 60 percent in Saudi Arabia and India.

India is one of the most affected countries. Dubai stock exchange was affected by the outage as well as the workers laboring in the Middle East who couldn’t send money to their families left in their home countries. The disruption of the two telecommunication cables known as SEA-ME-WE-4 and FLAG, caused difficulties for the U. S. and European companies in the outsourcing industry.

According to the Associated Press the cause of the damage is yet unknown, although one hypothesis is that the two cables might have been hit by a ship’s anchor. Authorities said that it could take a week to restore Internet service at its full capacity, and that the repairs were delayed by the unfavorable weather.

According to Reuters, Internet service in India had been restored to 80 percent Friday.

Rajesh Chharia, president of the Internet Service Providers' Association of India, said:

"Though we will continue to see some latency, there won't be any chocking in Internet access that we saw in the last couple of days." He added that cable repair ships had already been sent to fix the breaches.

The Internet disruption questions the vulnerability of the system. According to a Gulf analyst, this problem can happen anywhere and this incident should be considered a “wake-up call.”

This is not the first incident of this nature. In 2006, undersea cables near Taiwan were disrupted by an earthquake. For two months East Asia was affected by outage and low speed internet.