Clients of Web Hosting Providers who outsource their support services offshore may expect even slower responses than they've grown accustomed to.

There are unconfirmed reports of a major loss of web connectivity, reducing overall bandwidth to a crawl with very high latency, currently affecting most of the Middle East and parts of North Africa and the Indian sub-continent. The disruption started at around 07:30 GMT and has continued ever since. This is affecting all traffic in and out of the region - particularly SMTP.

Typical TTL to the US and Europe is currently around 1800ms on Broadband and 800ms on Tier 1 - compared to 180ms and 90ms respectively under normal conditions.

While unable establish the reason there is speculation it is likely to be a cable breakage somewhere between the Middle East and Europe.

Update

As an update to the above, it is now confirmed that 3 out of the 4 fiber cables that connect the Middle East, North Africa and Indian sub-continent to Europe and US have been cut.

These cables carry around 90% of the Internet and Voice communications to these areas, and will take considerable time to repair. On the last occasion (early 2008) it took almost 1 month to repair.

In the build up to Christmas this will severely affect eCommerce and Call Center activity - this will also affect hosting companies with customers in these regions which will not be able to access their servers/hosting accounts.

The affected cable providers are FLAG, SMW3 and SMW4.

http://www.internettrafficreport.com/

The 7 day graph also shows a slight drop in traffic and an increase in latency:

http://www.internettrafficreport.com/7day.htm