A third undersea cable has been cut between Dubai and Oman yesterday morning, plunging the international communication systems in Middle East and Asia into chaos. FLAG telecom, a British company that own the undersea cable network, reported that its FALCON, one of its submarine data cables, had been damaged at a location that is around 35 mile from Dubai, on a stretch between UAE and Oman.

"The new development has added further complications to the existing damage to the FLAG Europe-Asia and SEA-ME-WE4 cables. Yesterday morning’s cable damage has impacted all international voice calls through the du network. Severe congestion and degradation of international voice calls have occurred as a result," said a statement from Telecom operator du.

The outages, which initiated earlier this week, were caused at first by two submarine cable systems, the FLAG Europe-Asia and SEA-ME-WE4 cables, in the Mediterranean Sea which were cut, apparently by accident by ship anchors. The cable system which was cut somewhere 5.2 miles from Alexandria beach in northern Egypt was co-owned by several companies, among which AT&T Inc., the biggest U.S. phone company, and Verizon Communications Inc., the second-biggest U.S. phone company. Customers of both companies were affected.

Repairs may take up to two weeks. It is still unknown what actually happened, because undersea cables are very strong, shielded with several layers of steel. Repair ships have been immediately dispatched to repair all three interruptions, but depending on the conditions the operation may take anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of weeks.

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. 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.