Fergie's Tech Blog

Faulty cable crashes Pakistan Internet

Aamir Ashraf writes for Reuters:

An undersea cable carrying data between Pakistan and the outside world has developed a serious fault, virtually crippling data feeds, including the Internet, telecommunications officials said on Tuesday.

The system crashed late on Monday and was still down on Tuesday afternoon. Work in many offices across the country ground to a halt as people realized it was not one of Pakistan's regular, but usually brief, technical hitches.

"It's a worst-case scenario. We are literally blank," said a senior foreign banker who declined to be identified.

An official at the Karachi stock exchange said Pakistan's main bourse was unaffected as it had its own internal trading system.

Officials at Pakistan Telecommunication Ltd, which operates the link, said the fault was in an undersea cable and had been caused by a power supply problem.

Fixing it will entail an interruption for other countries using the link, including India, Dubai and Oman, one company official said.

posted by Fergie @ 6/28/2005 06:03:00 AM