A ship forced to drop anchor off the coast of Egypt because of bad weather ended up accidentally cutting two undersea cables that provide internet capacity for 75% of Asia. The accident is proving troublesome because it takes a while to send repair ships to the site and make the repair, and the resulting crippled internet is causing trouble for businesses, particularly outsourcing companies that rely on the internet for business. The internet's routers will gradually find new routes using other cables (i.e. from the east instead of the west of Asia) but this takes time and the resulting speed can be significantly slower. To me, it's incredible to see how fragile a large part of the internet can be, even though I read in some article from a USA perspective that they're not worried about such a thing over here because most of the content is produced/hosted here. But that's pretty short-sighted considering the amount of content produced overseas, and again the outsourcing issue. The US companies that are outsourcing get hit by the lack of connectivity overseas.

I suppose it would be expensive if it's even possible to protect such a long length of cable, but it's still surprising to see how much damage a single ship can do.