On Wednesday, two undersea cables carrying internet cables were broken by a boat anchor. The cables stretched from Italy to Alexandria, Egypt and affected telephone and internet access throughout the Middle East. India was also affected, with its bandwidth being reduced by half, and Sri Lanka was also affected.

A third undersea cable was cut today, this time off the shores of Dubai. This cable has affected internet signal to Dubai, but officials stress that this cable could be rerouted more easily than the Italy-Egypt cables. Residents of the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent have felt a major change in how they do their business and carry on their daily lives. India’s wealth of call centers will most likely be the hardest hit by this change.

This just goes to show you how hardwired we are to the internet. Without it, many of us are rendered helpless. How long will it be until we stop using land lines completely and make the final transition over to all internet all the time? Consider that most people in the United States and abroad rely more on the internet for their daily news than newspapers. If a major internet outage like this hit North America (which most experts say is unlikely due to our abundance of internet cables both on land and branching out through the Atlantic and Pacific oceans) most of us would be completely crippled.