Outage raises outsourcing questions

This past Wednesday, large parts of the Middle East and South Asia experienced an Internet outage when an undersea cable off the northern coast of Egypt was severed. Though 70-80 percent of Internet services are now said to be running normally thanks to traffic rerouting, the outage raises some important questions about the capacity of the current Internet architecture as well as our growing reliance on outsourcing. "In the U.S., this outage abroad wouldn't be a big deal-until your customer service operations mostly housed offshore go down," ZDnet's Larry Dignan writes. "If you have offshore operations you may want to review those contingency plans-especially if you were hit by this outage."

For more on the outage:
- see this ZDnet article on the outage in the Middle East