Local Editor
Damage to a submarine cable in the region plunged Yemen into internet outage for at least six days earlier this week.
The Falcon cable, which runs underwater in the Red Sea region, affected some 80 percent of Yemen's internet connections, which already suffers from slow speed and frequent cuts.
Messages sent to customers from Yemen's main telecommunications companies YemenNet and TeleYemen, confirmed the outage was due to a damaged underwater cable in the Suez canal, which also hit connectivity in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Sudan and Ethiopia, reports confirmed.
GCX, which owns the Falcon cable linking Muscat and the Suez Port, confirmed an anchor from a large vessel in the vicinity of the cables had caused major damage.
The company said it had deployed teams to repair the damage after acquiring necessary permits from authorities in the region.
The internet outage caused major disruptions in Yemen, where millions rely on internet connections to conduct day to day business or communicate via popular messaging apps.
"Places like Yemen just don't have a lot of redundancy, because they have underdeveloped infrastructure. So you have a situation where, despite the fact that there are more cables in the region, the country can still get taken out by the loss of a single cable," Doug Madory, director of internet analysis for Oracle Internet Intelligence told The Wired.
Yemen's conflict began in 2014 when the Houthi revolutionaries ousted the regime of Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi after it retracted its resignation.
The war escalated months later in March 2015 after a Saudi-led coalition launched a military campaign against the country to forcefully reinstate the resigned Hadi regime. It imposed a brutal bombing campaign that has since left thousands of civilians dead.
Tens of thousands of people have been killed and millions more displaced in what the United Nations has described as the world's worst humanitarian crisis.
Source: News Agencies, Edited by Website Team
