ALKHOBAR: A terse missive was put out through Saudi Aramco’s intranet, the company’s internal network, yesterday morning.

“The Internet has not been available since Friday afternoon for all business and home users,” it read. “Saudi Telecom Co. (STC) is currently working to restore service. Furthermore, information technology analysts are working with STC to establish a temporary, limited Internet service.”

Anyone who has been online in the past couple of days can confirm that the recent cut in undersea cables in the Mediterranean has once again stymied the digital flow to Saudi Arabia and neighboring countries. And involved companies are saying not to expect any improvement on their part before Thursday, and that connectivity may be hampered for the rest of the month.

Meanwhile, Saudi Internet service providers (ISPs) are scrambling to obtain more bandwidth from alternative channels.

This is the second major Internet outage this year and for the same reason. “It’s pathetic that here we are 11 months later facing the same crisis,” said Mohammad W. Bazaraa, technical general manager for Nesma Internet, one of the Kingdom’s largest ISPs.

According to a statement from France Telecom, undersea cables running between Sicily and Tunisia were cut, possibly due to seismic activity. In January this same line of cables was accidentally severed off the coast near Egypt. It was blamed on a vessel’s propellers severing the cables.

In Saudi Arabia, STC customers have been the hardest hit. International gateway provider Integrated Telecom Co. (ITC) stated that they have two international gateways — one in Jeddah and one in Alkhobar. They are routing traffic through Alkhobar and then on to Hong Kong. Currently, Internet traffic is being diverted east. The loss of the cable connection has meant fewer channels for data to flow, thus noticeably hampering connections. Customers are reporting long load times for Web pages and frequent time outs — when Web pages try to load for a number of minutes and then either load, partially load or go to an error page.

Saudi Aramco is the largest company in Saudi Arabia to be affected by the problem, but all Saudi businesses and individual users are struggling with the outage in some way. Saudi Aramco was able to restore its Internet and e-mail services yesterday.

“The three Saudi international gateway providers are now working to establish back-up links through the Far East. That requires certain agreements with the Far East upstream providers in regards to advertising the IP addresses. This advertising is a technical procedure under which changes to the network in Saudi Arabia are communicated or recognized by all parts of the global network,” Bazaraa explained.

“Even once this can be accomplished we will really only partially restore the Kingdom’s network to functionality. The Far East just doesn’t have enough capacity and we’re all competing for it.”

According to Bazaraa, more than 35 gigabits of international bandwidth has been lost. Plus, the international gateway providers are not blocking certain services that consume huge amounts of bandwidth per user, such as peer-to-peer (P2P) and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). Saudi businesses, especially small companies, will compete for the same limited bandwidth with teenagers downloading from YouTube.

The entire Middle East and parts of East Africa is being affected. The call center business in Egypt and India is in crisis. The severed undersea optic-fiber links were identified as the Southeast Asia-Middle East-Western Europe-3 (SEA-ME-WE-3), SEA-ME-WE-4 and FLAG. A cable repair ship has been directed to the sites to fix the cables.

Spokespersons for both France Telecom and Reliance GlobalCom advised that the connectivity situation may not improve before Thursday and may not return to normal until the end of the month.