Remember those fake chain emails about some event making the entire Internet crash? Or all those lame sci-fi plots about bringing down an empire by destroying a single ship or one little exhaust port? Leave it to the subcontinent to make an urban legend come true (thanks, o anonymous one):

An undersea cable carrying data between Pakistan and the outside world has developed a serious fault, virtually crippling data feeds, including the Internet, telecommunications officials said. The system crashed late on Monday and was still down on Tuesday evening. Many offices across the country ground to a halt…

“It’s a worst-case scenario. We are literally blank,” said a senior foreign banker who declined to be identified… Airlines and credit card companies were among the businesses hit by the crash. “It’s a total disaster,” said Nasir Ali, commercial director of the private Air Blue airline. “We have a Web-based booking system which has totally collapsed.”

PTCL provided satellite back-up for the link, which meant some people were able to get access to a very slow Internet connection, Hussain said, but users complained it was too slow to be of any use.

Both the Net and the connection to the cellular networks are down. The company in charge is saying it’ll take two weeks to repair:

Reports quoting engineers said the fault would likely to take two weeks to repair. The breakdown affects the main fibre-optic link beneath the Arabian Sea, 35 kilometres south of the city of Karachi. The cable is owned by a consortium of 92 countries – with SingTel acting as its operating agents.

The complex repair work may require a complete shutdown, potentially causing disruption in India, the United Arab Emirates, Djibouti and Oman, which are also linked to the damaged cable.

Turns out the high-speed Net depends on low-speed ships:

He said Singtel had called in Dubai-based E-Marine but its ship could take a day just to reach the site…

“The cable provides Pakistan’s major outer communication means and its fault has disrupted almost all communications with the rest of the world.” In Pakistan, much internet-based work ground to a halt. Rahim Kothari, a foreign exchange dealer in Karachi, told the Reuters agency: “We’re sitting here idle doing nothing. Trading volume has fallen by almost 80%.”

I’ve checked on some Pakistani Web sites, all of which seem to be functioning. They had the foresight to outsource their Web hosting to the U.S.

So if you were about to download some Junoon or some Musarrat Nazir off a file sharing network, you might want to wait a bit. Last I heard, a Talib from Quetta was hectoring Pakistan’s phone company about the importance of backups. He had a carrier pigeon on the back of his motorcycle 😉