FLAG Telecom said it has begun work on its three undersea cables which were cut. The India-based company operates the Fiber-Optic Link Around the Globe, a 17,500 mile long fiber optic cable which tuns from the eastern coast of North America to Japan.

Also, 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.

"We are still treating this as a crisis," a FLAG spokesman said to AP, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with company policy. "But the new cable will provide a diversity in routes and be more resilient."

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 (although no ships have been confirmed in the area). FALCON, the third submarine data cable, was damaged at a location near Dubai, on a stretch between UAE and Oman, a few days later.

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.

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 connection haven’t exactly been the best following the unfortunate incident. Egypt for example lost 70 percent of its Internet capacity and will continue to face this problem within the next week and a half.

It is still unknown what actually happened, 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.

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.