FLAG Telecom has confirmed that at least one of the three undersea fiber optic cables which were cut last week was snapped by an abandoned six-ton ship anchor. FLAG said that the FALCON cable spanning Dubai and Oman will be repaired by Sunday. The communications company maintained that its severed Europe-Asia Internet cable in the Mediterranean Sea that links Egypt and Italy also would be repaired by Sunday.

The India-based company operates the Fiber-Optic Link Around the Globe, a 17,500 mile long fiber optic cable which runs from the eastern coast of North America to Japan. FLAG Telecom announced it will lay a new, much stronger cable between Egypt and France. The new data link will be also laid on a different route. The new cable will be 1,900-mile-long and would allegedly take more than 18 months to complete, the company said.

The third cable cut, the SEA-ME-WE 4, or South East Asia-Middle East-West Europe 4 cable, belongs to a consortium of 16 international telecommunication companies. It lies just a few hundred meters from FLAG's Europe-Asia line and it will also be put back online shortly.

The impact in countries around the Gulf Region and South Asia had been minimized through redirecting communication services to new routes, but it is certain that Internet connections haven’t exactly been the best following the unfortunate incident.

It is still unknown what actually happened with the other two cut data links, because undersea cables are very strong, shielded with several layers of steel. A modern undersea or submarine communications cable is made up of a core of optical fibers, shielded with multiple layers of copper, aluminum, polycarbonate, stranded steel wires, Mylar and polyethylene.

Furthermore, it's unclear how the anchor cut the first FLAG cable. No ship has been identified yet as responsible, and the company did not mention whether the anchor was dragged over it from the surface or the cable moved or grinded against it due to undersea currents. While an exact explanation is delayed, conspiracy theories are looming all around the web. Internet junkies and bloggers have found the culprits: it's either the United States or the Islamist terrorists.

The first undersea cables were used for telegraph and were laid in the second half of the nineteenth century. As of 2003, submarine cables link all the world's populated continents.