Are You Experiencing Internet Slowdowns? Undersea Cable Has Been Damaged!

[shariq607]

Looks like some idiots(3 Divers) have been arrested for cutting the undersea cable linking south east Asia and Middle east to US and European internet systems. SeaMeWe-4 (South East Asia–Middle East–West Europe 4) along with damage to IMEWE (India-Middle East-Western Europe) and EIG (Europe India Gateway) has been damaged.

My internet has been severely affected, International websites take ages to load but Thai websites seems to operate just fine.

Any of you affected?

[JetsetBkk]

Not quite the atory as reported by CNN:

Once again an undersea cable has been cut — the South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe 4 (aka SEA-ME-WE 4) cable and that is causing an internet (and communications) slowdown in and around Africa, the Middle East and parts of Asia. The cut was said to be near Alexandria in Egypt. Tata Communications – previously Videsh Sanchar Nigam LimitedIndia – administers the network.

While the cut was on a single cable, it came at an unfortunate time as a few other major cables were in “maintenance mode” and that has resulted in problems for service providers across the region. Our sources in the telecom community confirmed that two other cables — Europe India Gateway (EIG) and India-Middle East-Western Europe (IMEWE) — were in ‘maintenance’ mode when the SWM4 got cut.

http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/gigaom/articles/2013_03_27_undersea_cable_cut_near_egypt_slows_down_internet_in_africa_middle_east_south_asia.html

[worgeordie]

I thought it was just the normal crap service I get from TOT,

the Internet is even going down now when it RAINS !, couple.

of weeks ago bit of rain,yesterday little rain both times lost

connection, came back, but unusable e.g. bytes 10- 50.

So think I will have to change to 3BB before the rainy season

Regards Worgeordie

[Para]

Mine is always crap up and down all day every day.

Where was the international undersea cable damaged a couple of years back causing serious outage for the whole APAC

[Morden]

Mine been slow and erratic for a week or two. I thought it was to do with that spam war in Europe.

[keeniau96]

I have noticed definite slowdown in the past two days. May have been out earlier but I have been sailing Tues-Sat and did not use internet.

[Para]

Could it be related to this????

Global internet slows after 'biggest attack in history'

27 March 2013 Last updated at 13:03 GMT

The internet around the world has been slowed down in what security experts are describing as the biggest cyber-attack of its kind in history.

A row between a spam-fighting group and hosting firm has sparked retaliation attacks affecting the wider internet.

It is having an impact on popular services like Netflix - and experts worry it could escalate to affect banking and email systems.

Five national cyber-police-forces are investigating the attacks.

Spamhaus, a group based in both London and Geneva, is a non-profit organisation that aims to help email providers filter out spam and other unwanted content.

To do this, the group maintains a number of blocklists - a database of servers known to be being used for malicious purposes. Recently, Spamhaus blocked servers maintained by Cyberbunker, a Dutch web host that states it will host anything with the exception
of child pornography or terrorism-related material.

Sven Olaf Kamphuis, who claims to be a spokesman for Cyberbunker, said, in a message, that Spamhaus was abusing its position,
and should not be allowed to decide "what goes and does not go on the internet".

Spamhaus has alleged that Cyberbunker, in cooperation with "criminal gangs" from Eastern Europe and Russia, is behind the attack.

Cyberbunker has not responded to the BBC's request for comment.

'Immense job'

Steve Linford, chief executive for Spamhaus, told the BBC the scale of the attack was unprecedented.

"We've been under this cyber-attack for well over a week.

Writing exactly one year ago for the BBC, Prof Alan Woodward predicted the inherent weaknesses in the web's domain name system.

He wrote: "It is essentially the phone book for the internet. If you could prevent access to the phone book then you would effectively render the web useless."

"But we're up - they haven't been able to knock us down. Our engineers are doing an immense job in keeping it up - this sort of attack would take down pretty much anything else."

Mr Linford told the BBC that the attack was being investigated by five different national cyber-police-forces around the world. He claimed he was unable to disclose more details because the forces were concerned that they too may suffer attacks on their own infrastructure.

The attackers have used a tactic known as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), which floods the intended target with large amounts
of traffic in an attempt to render it unreachable. In this case, Spamhaus's Domain Name System (DNS) servers were targeted - the infrastructure that joins domain names, such as bbc.co.uk, the website's numerical internet protocol address.

Mr Linford said the attack's power would be strong enough to take down government internet infrastructure.

"If you aimed this at Downing Street they would be down instantly," he said. "They would be completely off the internet."

He added: "These attacks are peaking at 300 Gbps (gigabits per second).

"Normally when there are attacks against major banks, we're talking about 50 Gbps"

Clogged-up motorway

The knock-on effect is hurting internet services globally, said Prof Alan Woodward, a cybersecurity expert at the University of Surrey.

"If you imagine it as a motorway, attacks try and put enough traffic on there to clog up the on and off ramps," he told the BBC. "With this attack, there's so much traffic it's clogging up the motorway itself." Arbor Networks, a firm which specialises in protecting
against DDoS attacks, also said it was the biggest such attack they had seen.

"The largest DDoS attack that we have witnessed prior to this was in 2010, which was 100 Gbps. Obviously the jump from 100 to 300 is
pretty massive," said Dan Holden, the company's director of security research. "There's certainly possibility for some collateral damage to other services along the way, depending on what that infrastructure looks like."

Spamhaus said it was able to cope as it has highly distributed infrastructure in a number of countries.The group is supported by many of the world's largest internet companies who rely on it to filter unwanted material. Mr Linford told the BBC that several companies, such as Google, had made their resources available to help "absorb all of this traffic".

The attacks typically happened in intermittent bursts of high activity.

"They are targeting every part of the internet infrastructure that they feel can be brought down," Mr Linford said.

"Spamhaus has more than 80 servers around the world. We've built the biggest DNS server around

[Pib]

No slowdown noticed over the past days or weeks (knock on wood)...I'm on a True DOCSIS/cable 14Mb/1.4Mb plan here in Bangkok.

[lemonjelly]

yep...... slow as mud today.

[Phil Conners]

Horrible, both True and 3BB.

[shariq607]

Honestly, im so fed up the past few days that international websites for example new york times takes forever to load. It seems that the problem only occurs at day time, now I have both fiber optic and true adsl and it seems both is taking forever to load, so surely it cant be a coincidence and something is really up. Speedtest to thai servers show full speed but when trying on international servers, we are talking kilobits here.

[Pib]

Honestly, im so fed up the past few days that international websites for example new york times takes forever to load. It seems that the problem only occurs at day time, now I have both fiber optic and true adsl and it seems both is taking forever to load, so surely it cant be a coincidence and something is really up. Speedtest to thai servers show full speed but when trying on international servers, we are talking kilobits here.

It may be circuits/equipment in "your local area." I'm on a True DOCSIS/cable 14Mb/1.4Mb plan here in western Bangkok and site speed has been normal/good for me. I just accessed the NY Times and the Washington Post and they pulled/opened-up in about a second.

[canman]

There must be more to this story. SeaMeWe-4 was completed around 2004 and so was installed using modern techniques. This means that the shore approaches would have been buried to a depth of at least 2 meters. For "divers" to locate and de-bury this cable indicates a sophisticated operation. These cables are triple armoured with high tensile steel and would require some serious equipment to cut.

I wonder who these divers worked for?

Edited April 2, 2013 by canman

[joncl]

Agreed as Pib said above - no major issues here in Central BKK at all and would not have known there were issues unless I read this thread.

[fiberman]

There must be more to this story. SeaMeWe-4 was completed around 2004 and so was installed using modern techniques. This means that the shore approaches would have been buried to a depth of at least 2 meters. For "divers" to locate and de-bury this cable indicates a sophisticated operation. These cables are triple armoured with high tensile steel and would require some serious equipment to cut.

I wonder who these divers worked for?

A lot of the cables going into the Alexandria cable station are in fact not buried in certain sections so it would be relatively simple to locate and damage these cables. None of the cables are triple armoured, they would all be double armoured which while quite heavy is relatively easy to cut with the right equipment.

[Simon1985]

^{This seems to be continually posted on the forum about poor internet services. Its not like the internet was invented 2 years ago. Its about time the Thai Government sorted this out . Its a poor show.}

Edited April 2, 2013 by Simon1985

[mortenaa]

I have been seriously affected by this. Ping speeds to all over Europe now sucks bigtime!!

[canman]

There must be more to this story. SeaMeWe-4 was completed around 2004 and so was installed using modern techniques. This means that the shore approaches would have been buried to a depth of at least 2 meters. For "divers" to locate and de-bury this cable indicates a sophisticated operation. These cables are triple armoured with high tensile steel and would require some serious equipment to cut.

I wonder who these divers worked for?

A lot of the cables going into the Alexandria cable station are in fact not buried in certain sections so it would be relatively simple to locate and damage these cables. None of the cables are triple armoured, they would all be double armoured which while quite heavy is relatively easy to cut with the right equipment.

Thanks for the info

[bendejo]

Mine is always crap up and down all day every day.

Where was the international undersea cable damaged a couple of years back causing serious outage for the whole APAC

I think that was in December 2006, it was due to an earthquake near Taiwan.

I was in Macau at the time, couldn't get $$ from the ATM

[Chicog]

Spamhaus are a major pain in the arse, routinely blocking entire ISPs to punish one spammer. They should be reined in or shut down.

Any company with half a brain cell should *never* use Spamhaus block lists.

[Para]

Mine is always crap up and down all day every day.

Where was the international undersea cable damaged a couple of years back causing serious outage for the whole APAC

I think that was in December 2006, it was due to an earthquake near Taiwan.

I was in Macau at the time, couldn't get $$ from the ATM

Was it as long ago as that? Damn getting older without even realizing it....