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With all this connectivity floating around, it’s easy to suffer under the illusion that we’ve moved beyond wires and cables, but such is not the case, as several African countries discovered the hard way when a heavy dose of reality dealt a crippling blow to the Internet.

While waiting for access to a port in Mombasa, a ship dropped the offending anchor in a restricted area off the coast. The anchor barreled towards the sea floor, as anchors are wont to do, and upon contact damaged two of three undersea fiber-optic cables responsible for delivering high-speed Internet access to a large portion of Africa. The two damaged cables link the eastern costal region of Africa to the United Arab Emirates and link countries in the affected region to each other. The remaining cable maintains a link between the affected region to Europe, India, and South Africa.

The cables will take up to two weeks to repair, and until that time, speeds in Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, Ethiopia and South Sudan will experience twenty-percent slower speeds.

There’s a Moby Dick analogy in here somewhere, but it just keeps slipping away.

Full story at BBC via Geekosystem.

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Photo credit: Fotolia