After service disruption, Egypt arrests three divers severing undersea internet cable

Recent internet service disruption in parts of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia may have been the result of sabotage. Egypt’s coastguard has caught three divers in the act of cutting an underwater internet cable off the port of Alexandria, fueling speculation that the incident could be connected to the outages that affected operator Seacom last week. Reuters reported the arrest, which was confirmed by an army spokesperson via Facebook.

Last week, Seacom CEO Mark Simpson said that the most likely cause of the outage was “external aggression to the cable most probably caused by a larger vessel dragging its anchor across the sea bed,” a common issue for undersea cable operators. No motive has been suggested for the divers arrested, but Reuters notes that crime and disorder have been rising in Egypt since the dictator Hosni Mubarak was deposed two years ago.