By Pakinam Amer
Associated Press Writer
First Published: 11 Feb., 2008 10:20
Cairo - An Egyptian appeals court on Monday spared an Al-Jazeera journalist a six-month prison sentence by overturning a ruling that she tarnished the country's reputation after running a report on police torture, a judicial official and her lawyer said.
But the court upheld Howaida Taha's conviction on a separate charge that she fabricated videotapes used in the documentary and maintained a 20,000 Egyptian pound (about US$3,600) fine imposed on her, said a judicial official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
Taha, a documentary producer for the pan-Arab satellite station who is known for her criticism of the Egyptian regime, was first detained in January 2007 for two days for possessing 50 video tapes that police alleged contained fabricated scenes of torture by Egyptian police. At the time, she said the footage was a "reconstruction" for a documentary.
She was sentenced in May to six months in jail after a Cairo state security court found her guilty of "harming the country's interests" and "fabricating" the torture scenes.
Taha's lawyer, Ahmed Helmi, said he planned to take the case to the country's highest court, the Court of Cassation, in hope that the conviction on the second charge of fabricating the videotapes would be overturned.
"For now, we will pay the fine but the conviction in her case is really baseless. That is why we will proceed with the case," he said.
Taha is currently in Doha, Qatar, where she lives and where Al-Jazeera is based.
The torture documentary, "Beyond the Sun," was aired on Al-Jazeera in April, as Taha had kept copies of the confiscated tapes.
Rights groups say torture, including sexual abuse, is routinely conducted in Egyptian police stations. The government denies systematic torture but has investigated several officers on allegations of abuse. Some were convicted and sentenced to prison.
During her last visit to Egypt late January, Taha was again briefly detained and questioned along with her crew before being released.
She was taken into custody while filming in a low-income neighborhood in Cairo for allegedly not having official permission to film, her lawyer and police had said.
Police also confiscated her tapes and sent them to be inspected by the Department of Artistic Inspection.
Taha has said she did obtain the proper permission to film but said she was later told that she also needed a separate permission from the Interior Ministry _ something she said was not part of normal procedure.
The documentary she was working on when she was last detained deals with people living on the edge of society.
Link: http://www.wtop.com/?nid=500&sid=1343495
Monday, February 18, 2008
FLAG Telecom: Repair ship to get next week to site of damaged Internet cables off Egyptian coast (AP)
By Pakinam Amer
Associated Press Writer
First Published: 1 Feb., 2008 06:52
Cairo - A repair ship is expected to arrive next week to the site of severed cables off the northern coast of Egypt to begin repair work on the damage that has disrupted Internet services across the Middle East and India, a leading provider of international network services said Friday.
The U.K-based FLAG Telecom said in an e-mail sent to The Associated Press that the ship was to arrive Tuesday on the location in the Mediterranean Sea. The repair work will likely be completed in a week of the ship's arrival, it said.
In a separate statement, FLAG Telecom reported that a different undersea Internet cable, FALCON, also belonging to the company, had been cut Friday at 0559 GMT at a location 56 kilometers (34.8 miles) from Dubai, on a stretch between the United Arab Emirates and Oman in the Persian Gulf.
There were no other details on this damage _ the first to be reported in the Persian Gulf.
But FLAG Telecom said that a "repair ship has been notified and expected to arrive at the site in the next few days," apparently referring to the Persian Gulf location.
Earlier, the company said its FLAG Europe-Asia cable in the Mediterranean was cut Wednesday morning, 8.3 kilometers (5 miles) from the Egyptian port of Alexandria, on a stretch linking Egypt to Italy. The company also said it was able to restore circuits to some customers and was switching to alternative routes for others.
It did not provide any details as to why it would take until Tuesday for the repair ship to arrive at a site so near the port of Alexandria. The harbor has been closed for most of this week because of bad weather.
Wednesday's damage to two undersea Internet cables off Egypt's coast disrupted Web access across a wide swath of Asia and the Middle East.
Egypt's Minister of Communications and Information Technology Tarek Kamil said Friday that the Internet service in the country would be up and running to about 80 percent of its usual capacity within 48 hours, revising an earlier statement that this level would be restored by late Friday.
"However, it's not before ten days until the Internet service returns to its normal performance," Kamil told the Friday edition of the state Al-Ahram newspaper. There are eight million Internet users in Egypt, according to a ministry count.
On Thursday, Kamil described the damage as an "earthquake" and said the reason behind the cut would only be determined after the repair teams with their robot equipment reach the damaged cables.
The official Middle East News Agency quoted the minister as saying technicians managed to raise the level of the Internet service Thursday to about 45 percent and that Telecom Egypt would get soon a bandwidth of 10 gigabyte to be increased to 13 gigabyte _ close to the country's total capacity of 16 gigabytes.
But Internet access remained sporadic or nonexistent Friday, the first day of the official Muslim weekend in the Middle East when all government offices and most businesses are closed.
Kamil, who said international telephone services have not been affected by the incident, also praised the cooperation among the country's companies with the ministry to share the service and the cooperation of international companies in France, Italy and southeast Asia.
The paper also said that on Thursday, the state Telecom Egypt communication company "sealed a deal" for a new 3,100 kilometer (1,900 miles) -long undersea cable between Egypt and France, also through the Mediterranean. That cable would take over 18 months to complete, the report said. It did not say who Telecom's partners in the deal were.
___
Associated Press Writer Zeina Karam contributed to this report from Beirut, Lebanon.
Associated Press Writer
First Published: 1 Feb., 2008 06:52
Cairo - A repair ship is expected to arrive next week to the site of severed cables off the northern coast of Egypt to begin repair work on the damage that has disrupted Internet services across the Middle East and India, a leading provider of international network services said Friday.
The U.K-based FLAG Telecom said in an e-mail sent to The Associated Press that the ship was to arrive Tuesday on the location in the Mediterranean Sea. The repair work will likely be completed in a week of the ship's arrival, it said.
In a separate statement, FLAG Telecom reported that a different undersea Internet cable, FALCON, also belonging to the company, had been cut Friday at 0559 GMT at a location 56 kilometers (34.8 miles) from Dubai, on a stretch between the United Arab Emirates and Oman in the Persian Gulf.
There were no other details on this damage _ the first to be reported in the Persian Gulf.
But FLAG Telecom said that a "repair ship has been notified and expected to arrive at the site in the next few days," apparently referring to the Persian Gulf location.
Earlier, the company said its FLAG Europe-Asia cable in the Mediterranean was cut Wednesday morning, 8.3 kilometers (5 miles) from the Egyptian port of Alexandria, on a stretch linking Egypt to Italy. The company also said it was able to restore circuits to some customers and was switching to alternative routes for others.
It did not provide any details as to why it would take until Tuesday for the repair ship to arrive at a site so near the port of Alexandria. The harbor has been closed for most of this week because of bad weather.
Wednesday's damage to two undersea Internet cables off Egypt's coast disrupted Web access across a wide swath of Asia and the Middle East.
Egypt's Minister of Communications and Information Technology Tarek Kamil said Friday that the Internet service in the country would be up and running to about 80 percent of its usual capacity within 48 hours, revising an earlier statement that this level would be restored by late Friday.
"However, it's not before ten days until the Internet service returns to its normal performance," Kamil told the Friday edition of the state Al-Ahram newspaper. There are eight million Internet users in Egypt, according to a ministry count.
On Thursday, Kamil described the damage as an "earthquake" and said the reason behind the cut would only be determined after the repair teams with their robot equipment reach the damaged cables.
The official Middle East News Agency quoted the minister as saying technicians managed to raise the level of the Internet service Thursday to about 45 percent and that Telecom Egypt would get soon a bandwidth of 10 gigabyte to be increased to 13 gigabyte _ close to the country's total capacity of 16 gigabytes.
But Internet access remained sporadic or nonexistent Friday, the first day of the official Muslim weekend in the Middle East when all government offices and most businesses are closed.
Kamil, who said international telephone services have not been affected by the incident, also praised the cooperation among the country's companies with the ministry to share the service and the cooperation of international companies in France, Italy and southeast Asia.
The paper also said that on Thursday, the state Telecom Egypt communication company "sealed a deal" for a new 3,100 kilometer (1,900 miles) -long undersea cable between Egypt and France, also through the Mediterranean. That cable would take over 18 months to complete, the report said. It did not say who Telecom's partners in the deal were.
___
Associated Press Writer Zeina Karam contributed to this report from Beirut, Lebanon.
Fallout from Mideast damage from cut cables spreads to India (AP)
By Pakinam Amer
Associated Press Writer
First Published: 31 Jan., 2008 10:03
Cairo - Fallout spread Thursday from a cut in two undersea Internet cables off Egypt's coast, with India waking up to half of its bandwidth disrupted and widespread outages still hampering a wide swathe of the Mideast.
Officials said it could take a week or more to fix the cables, in part because of bad weather. Officials in several countries were scrambling to reroute traffic to satellites and to other cables through Asia.
In all, users in India, Pakistan, Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Bahrain were affected. Israel was unaffected by the outages because its Internet traffic is connected to Europe through a different undersea cable, and Lebanon and Iraq were also operating normally.
The biggest impact to the rest of the world could come from the outages across India _ where many U.S. companies outsource back-office operations including customer service call centers.
The outage also raised questions about the system's vulnerability. A Gulf analyst called it a "wake-up call" while an analyst in London cautioned that no one, including the West, was immune to such disruptions.
They could have a "massive impact on businesses," said Alex Burmaster, from Nielsen Online in London, and ordinary people "probably couldn't imagine" a life without the Internet.
Large-scale disruptions are rare but not unknown. East Asia suffered nearly two months of outages and slow service after an earthquake damaged undersea cables near Taiwan in December 2006. That repair operation also was hampered by bad weather.
So far, most governments in the region appeared to be operating normally, apparently because they had switched to backup satellite systems. However, the outages had caused slowdown in traffic on Dubai's stock exchange Wednesday.
In India, major outsourcing firms, such as Infosys and Wipro, and U.S. companies with significant back-office and research and development operations in India, such as IBM and Intel, said they were still trying to assess how their operations had been impacted, if at all.
But the president of the Internet Service Providers' Association of India, Rajesh Chharia, said companies that serve the East Coast of the United States and Britain had been badly hit.
"The companies that serve the (U.S.) East coast and the UK are worst affected. The delay is very bad in some cases," Chharia told The Associated Press. "They have to arrange backup plans or they have to accept the poor quality for the time being until the fiber is restored.
Chharia said some companies were rerouting their service through the Pacific route, bypassing the disrupted cables. He said roughly 50 percent of the country's bandwidth had been affected.
At the New Delhi office of Symantec Corp., a security software maker based in Cupertino, Calif., "there's definitely been a slowdown. We're able to work but the system is very slow," said Anurag Kuthiala, a system engineer.
"There's no sense of how soon the problem will be fixed," he added.
It appeared the cables had been cut north of the port city of Alexandria, and rumors in Egypt said a ship's anchor had cut them.
However, a top Egyptian telecommunications official cautioned Thursday that workers won't know for sure what caused the cuts in the cables until they are able to get repair ships and divers to the area, off the northern coast of Egypt. The official in Egypt's Ministry of Communications and Information Technology asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
Rough weather and seas prevented repair ships from getting to the site Wednesday, the official said _ and it was unclear how soon they could get there.
And, even once the repair workers can arrive at the site, it could take as much as a week to repair the cable, the official said.
TeleGeography, a U.S. research group that tracks submarine cables around the world, said the Mediterranean undersea cable cuts reduced the amount of available capacity on the route from Mideast to Europe by 75 percent, and that until service was restored, many providers in Egypt and the Middle East would have to reroute their traffic around the globe, to Southeast Asia and across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.
Alan Mauldin, research chief at the Washington-based TeleGeography, said similar outages in the future could be averted by new cable construction _ even though multiple cables could not guarantee against outages.
Mustafa Alani, head of security and terrorism department at the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center, said the outage should be a "wake-up call" for governments and professionals to divert more resources to protect vital infrastructure.
"This shows how easy it would be to attack" vital networks, such as Internet, mobile phones, he said. He was referring to the Internet, mobile phone, electronic banking and government services.
Alani said Wednesday's damage wasn't terrorism _ but it could have been. "When it comes to great technology, it's not about building it, it's how to protect it," he added.
An official at the Dubai Mercantile Exchange, Gerald David, said trading Thursday morning resumed normally following the Wednesday slowdown after which backup systems kicked in. A Mercantile spokesman said the exchange partnered with Nymex network engineering and rerouted all network traffic from Dubai trading floor to two unaffected circuits.
Saudi Telecom Company did not answer calls on Thursday, a day off in the kingdom, but the English-language Saudi newspaper Arab News said Saudi Telecom had lost more than 50 percent of its international online connectivity due to the problem.
___
Associated Press Writers Sam F. Ghattas in Beirut, Matt Rosenberg in New Delhi, India and Barbara Surk in Dubai , United Arab Emirates contributed to this report.
Associated Press Writer
First Published: 31 Jan., 2008 10:03
Cairo - Fallout spread Thursday from a cut in two undersea Internet cables off Egypt's coast, with India waking up to half of its bandwidth disrupted and widespread outages still hampering a wide swathe of the Mideast.
Officials said it could take a week or more to fix the cables, in part because of bad weather. Officials in several countries were scrambling to reroute traffic to satellites and to other cables through Asia.
In all, users in India, Pakistan, Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Bahrain were affected. Israel was unaffected by the outages because its Internet traffic is connected to Europe through a different undersea cable, and Lebanon and Iraq were also operating normally.
The biggest impact to the rest of the world could come from the outages across India _ where many U.S. companies outsource back-office operations including customer service call centers.
The outage also raised questions about the system's vulnerability. A Gulf analyst called it a "wake-up call" while an analyst in London cautioned that no one, including the West, was immune to such disruptions.
They could have a "massive impact on businesses," said Alex Burmaster, from Nielsen Online in London, and ordinary people "probably couldn't imagine" a life without the Internet.
Large-scale disruptions are rare but not unknown. East Asia suffered nearly two months of outages and slow service after an earthquake damaged undersea cables near Taiwan in December 2006. That repair operation also was hampered by bad weather.
So far, most governments in the region appeared to be operating normally, apparently because they had switched to backup satellite systems. However, the outages had caused slowdown in traffic on Dubai's stock exchange Wednesday.
In India, major outsourcing firms, such as Infosys and Wipro, and U.S. companies with significant back-office and research and development operations in India, such as IBM and Intel, said they were still trying to assess how their operations had been impacted, if at all.
But the president of the Internet Service Providers' Association of India, Rajesh Chharia, said companies that serve the East Coast of the United States and Britain had been badly hit.
"The companies that serve the (U.S.) East coast and the UK are worst affected. The delay is very bad in some cases," Chharia told The Associated Press. "They have to arrange backup plans or they have to accept the poor quality for the time being until the fiber is restored.
Chharia said some companies were rerouting their service through the Pacific route, bypassing the disrupted cables. He said roughly 50 percent of the country's bandwidth had been affected.
At the New Delhi office of Symantec Corp., a security software maker based in Cupertino, Calif., "there's definitely been a slowdown. We're able to work but the system is very slow," said Anurag Kuthiala, a system engineer.
"There's no sense of how soon the problem will be fixed," he added.
It appeared the cables had been cut north of the port city of Alexandria, and rumors in Egypt said a ship's anchor had cut them.
However, a top Egyptian telecommunications official cautioned Thursday that workers won't know for sure what caused the cuts in the cables until they are able to get repair ships and divers to the area, off the northern coast of Egypt. The official in Egypt's Ministry of Communications and Information Technology asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
Rough weather and seas prevented repair ships from getting to the site Wednesday, the official said _ and it was unclear how soon they could get there.
And, even once the repair workers can arrive at the site, it could take as much as a week to repair the cable, the official said.
TeleGeography, a U.S. research group that tracks submarine cables around the world, said the Mediterranean undersea cable cuts reduced the amount of available capacity on the route from Mideast to Europe by 75 percent, and that until service was restored, many providers in Egypt and the Middle East would have to reroute their traffic around the globe, to Southeast Asia and across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.
Alan Mauldin, research chief at the Washington-based TeleGeography, said similar outages in the future could be averted by new cable construction _ even though multiple cables could not guarantee against outages.
Mustafa Alani, head of security and terrorism department at the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center, said the outage should be a "wake-up call" for governments and professionals to divert more resources to protect vital infrastructure.
"This shows how easy it would be to attack" vital networks, such as Internet, mobile phones, he said. He was referring to the Internet, mobile phone, electronic banking and government services.
Alani said Wednesday's damage wasn't terrorism _ but it could have been. "When it comes to great technology, it's not about building it, it's how to protect it," he added.
An official at the Dubai Mercantile Exchange, Gerald David, said trading Thursday morning resumed normally following the Wednesday slowdown after which backup systems kicked in. A Mercantile spokesman said the exchange partnered with Nymex network engineering and rerouted all network traffic from Dubai trading floor to two unaffected circuits.
Saudi Telecom Company did not answer calls on Thursday, a day off in the kingdom, but the English-language Saudi newspaper Arab News said Saudi Telecom had lost more than 50 percent of its international online connectivity due to the problem.
___
Associated Press Writers Sam F. Ghattas in Beirut, Matt Rosenberg in New Delhi, India and Barbara Surk in Dubai , United Arab Emirates contributed to this report.
Internet outages disrupt businesses, communication across Mideast, Gulf (AP)
By Pakinam Amer
Associated Press Writer
First Published: 30 Jan., 2008 16:41
Cairo - Internet outages disrupted business and personal usage across a wide swathe of the Middle East on Wednesday after two undersea cables in the Mediterranean were damaged, government officials and Internet service providers said.
In Cairo, the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology said the cut of the international communications cables Flag and Seamewe 4 had led to a partial disruption of Internet services and other telecommunications across much of Egypt.
At the Egyptian stock market, IT department engineer Mahmoud Mansour said the disruptions did not affect the operations at the exchange.
Emergency teams were quickly trying to find alternative routes, including by satellites, to end the disruptions, said Minister Tariq Kamel. But service was still slow or nonexistent by Wednesday night.
A telecommunications expert at the Egyptian communications ministry, Rafaat Hindy, told The Associated Press that the government is "engaged in efforts to try and overcome the consequences of the problem" but cautioned that "solving this could take days."
U.S. expert Eric Schoonover, senior research analyst at TeleGeography, a Washington-based group that tracks submarine cables around the world, said the cables severed "account to 75 percent of the capacity connecting Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries to Europe.
It would take "a few days up to one week before submarine cable operators deploy ships to bring the cables up and fix the fault," Schoonover said, echoing gloomy predictions from engineers in Cairo.
Phone lines in Egypt still work, indicating "network operators in the area are rerouting traffic through emergency channels, including around India and back through Asia to the U.S. and other threshold links that can bypass that particular bottleneck," Schoonover added.
Despite this being an international cable affecting many Gulf and Arab countries, Egyptian authorities said that being closest to it, they have responsibility coordinating with companies to fix this problem. "We are working as fast as we can," Hindy said.
Internet service also was disrupted in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates in the Gulf, which markets itself as a top Mideast business and luxury tourist hub. Both Internet service providers was affected and one was completely down in the morning. DU restored Internet service by the afternoon although browsing was very slow.
The other carrier, Etisalat, and DU said international telephone service was also affected by the cable break.
DU attributed the disruption to a fault in "two international cable systems" in the Mediterranean Sea but gave no details.
It was not clear what caused the damage to the cable.
Schoonover said there was a rumor that an illegally or improperly anchored ship caused the problem, but TeleGeography cannot verify this. Cables get damaged all the time but Schoonover believes this was the first time two undersea cables next to one another in a very thin route were cut at the same time.
An official who works in the customer care department of DU, who identified himself only as Hamed because he was not authorized to talk to the media, said the cable cut took place between Alexandria, Egypt, and Palermo, Italy.
Although he was not in a position to describe the technical fault, Hamed said engineers contracted by DU were working to solve the problem. By early afternoon, the service was flooded with complaints and the ISP had found alternative routes but Hamed said "there is slowness while browsing on the Internet."
DU services Dubai media city, Internet City and Knowledge Village, which houses major university campuses.
The ISP also serves the Dubai International Financial Center (DIFC), including the Bourse, major malls, and big residential communities including the Palm Jumeira artificial island off Dubai's coast.
The deputy business editor of Khaleej Times newspaper said the overall trading volume was low at the DIFC due to a sharp drop of on-line trading.
"There was a drop in the trading activity," said Issac John, although he was not sure it was entirely due to the Internet problems.
Wednesday's trade volume amounted to nearly US$330 million, which is well short of closer to US$1 billion on a good day.
There was no total outage in Kuwait, but service was interrupted Tuesday and Wednesday. The Gulfnet International Company apologized in an e-mail Wednesday to its customers for the "degraded performance in Internet browsing," which it said was caused by a cable cut in the Mediterranean.
In Saudi Arabia, some users said Internet was functioning fine but others said it was slow or totally down.
A staffer at a Saudi ISP said that they were told that a cable rupture was the cause of the problem, which began early Wednesday. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media. Calls to Saudi Telecom went unanswered Wednesday afternoon, the start of the weekend in Saudi Arabia.
Users in Bahrain and Qatar also complained of slow Internet.
Associated Press Writer
First Published: 30 Jan., 2008 16:41
Cairo - Internet outages disrupted business and personal usage across a wide swathe of the Middle East on Wednesday after two undersea cables in the Mediterranean were damaged, government officials and Internet service providers said.
In Cairo, the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology said the cut of the international communications cables Flag and Seamewe 4 had led to a partial disruption of Internet services and other telecommunications across much of Egypt.
At the Egyptian stock market, IT department engineer Mahmoud Mansour said the disruptions did not affect the operations at the exchange.
Emergency teams were quickly trying to find alternative routes, including by satellites, to end the disruptions, said Minister Tariq Kamel. But service was still slow or nonexistent by Wednesday night.
A telecommunications expert at the Egyptian communications ministry, Rafaat Hindy, told The Associated Press that the government is "engaged in efforts to try and overcome the consequences of the problem" but cautioned that "solving this could take days."
U.S. expert Eric Schoonover, senior research analyst at TeleGeography, a Washington-based group that tracks submarine cables around the world, said the cables severed "account to 75 percent of the capacity connecting Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries to Europe.
It would take "a few days up to one week before submarine cable operators deploy ships to bring the cables up and fix the fault," Schoonover said, echoing gloomy predictions from engineers in Cairo.
Phone lines in Egypt still work, indicating "network operators in the area are rerouting traffic through emergency channels, including around India and back through Asia to the U.S. and other threshold links that can bypass that particular bottleneck," Schoonover added.
Despite this being an international cable affecting many Gulf and Arab countries, Egyptian authorities said that being closest to it, they have responsibility coordinating with companies to fix this problem. "We are working as fast as we can," Hindy said.
Internet service also was disrupted in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates in the Gulf, which markets itself as a top Mideast business and luxury tourist hub. Both Internet service providers was affected and one was completely down in the morning. DU restored Internet service by the afternoon although browsing was very slow.
The other carrier, Etisalat, and DU said international telephone service was also affected by the cable break.
DU attributed the disruption to a fault in "two international cable systems" in the Mediterranean Sea but gave no details.
It was not clear what caused the damage to the cable.
Schoonover said there was a rumor that an illegally or improperly anchored ship caused the problem, but TeleGeography cannot verify this. Cables get damaged all the time but Schoonover believes this was the first time two undersea cables next to one another in a very thin route were cut at the same time.
An official who works in the customer care department of DU, who identified himself only as Hamed because he was not authorized to talk to the media, said the cable cut took place between Alexandria, Egypt, and Palermo, Italy.
Although he was not in a position to describe the technical fault, Hamed said engineers contracted by DU were working to solve the problem. By early afternoon, the service was flooded with complaints and the ISP had found alternative routes but Hamed said "there is slowness while browsing on the Internet."
DU services Dubai media city, Internet City and Knowledge Village, which houses major university campuses.
The ISP also serves the Dubai International Financial Center (DIFC), including the Bourse, major malls, and big residential communities including the Palm Jumeira artificial island off Dubai's coast.
The deputy business editor of Khaleej Times newspaper said the overall trading volume was low at the DIFC due to a sharp drop of on-line trading.
"There was a drop in the trading activity," said Issac John, although he was not sure it was entirely due to the Internet problems.
Wednesday's trade volume amounted to nearly US$330 million, which is well short of closer to US$1 billion on a good day.
There was no total outage in Kuwait, but service was interrupted Tuesday and Wednesday. The Gulfnet International Company apologized in an e-mail Wednesday to its customers for the "degraded performance in Internet browsing," which it said was caused by a cable cut in the Mediterranean.
In Saudi Arabia, some users said Internet was functioning fine but others said it was slow or totally down.
A staffer at a Saudi ISP said that they were told that a cable rupture was the cause of the problem, which began early Wednesday. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media. Calls to Saudi Telecom went unanswered Wednesday afternoon, the start of the weekend in Saudi Arabia.
Users in Bahrain and Qatar also complained of slow Internet.
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