Indian Outsourcing strongly hit by Internet disruption

India's vital outsourcing industry, which relies heavily on the Internet, struggled to overcome supply disruptions on Thursday after damage to undersea cables in the Mediterranean.

Internet connections may take up to 15 days to return to normal, businesses said, adding that telecommunications in neighbouring Bangladesh and Sri Lanka were also affected.

“Information technology companies, software companies and call centres that provide online services to the UK or the US East Coast are the worst affected,” said Rajesh Chharia, president of the Internet Service Providers' Association of India.

“Some of them are re-routing through the Pacific as a backup, but the voice quality and speed of traffic will be highly degraded,” he said, adding this solution left operators with half their normal bandwidth.

Egyptian officials said that an undersea communications cable had been cut, while in Kuwait the government said “weather conditions and maritime traffic” had damaged two cables, affecting most of the region.