Beta News reports that 3 undersea cables carrying a huge amount of Internet traffic for the Middle East and South Asia were cut within 40 minutes of each other, resulting in large outages in several countries. The outage underscores the immense strategic value of fiber optic cables in the information age. It incidentally highlights the degree to which the economic system of the world is dependent on a hegemon simply for existence.
If this is just an accident, then the Middle East’s cables are awful accident prone. These lines were cut not to long ago with similar results.