SOUDI ARABIA: Two years after a series of cable disruptions in Middle East and Europe, the same seem to be repeated on Friday when three international submarine cables in the Mediterranean Sea were damaged.

This disruption caused serious damage to Internet and phone traffic in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, India and all of the Gulf states.

The location of the fault was thought to have occurred between Tunisia and Italy. The three damaged cables are FLAG Europe-Asia cable, operated by Reliance Globalcom, and two consortium cables, SeaMeWe-3 and SeaMeWe-4 owned jointly by several telecommunications companies.

New cable construction should help to prevent such outages in the future, according to TeleGeography Research Director Alan Mauldin. “Many new cable systems are slated to enter service between Europe and Egypt in the next few years, including Telecom Egypt TE North cable, Orascom MENA system, FLAG’s HAWK cable, the IMEWE consortium cable, and the EIG consortium cable.”