The internet outage that swept across the Middle East and S. Asia is likely to affect Saudi access for the rest of the month, Arab News reports. The cut is particularly affecting Saudi ARAMCO, according to correspondent Molouk Ba-Isa. Her very informative article gives details on what happened (they think) and how people are trying to work around the disruptions. The piece also notes that because of the outage, small businesses in Saudi Arabia are competing for existing bandwidth with P2P users and those watching streaming videos.

Internet woes may last through December
Molouk Y. Ba-Isa | Arab News

ALKHOBAR: A terse missive was put out through Saudi Aramco’s intranet, the company’s internal network, yesterday morning.

“The Internet has not been available since Friday afternoon for all business and home users,” it read. “Saudi Telecom Co. (STC) is currently working to restore service. Furthermore, information technology analysts are working with STC to establish a temporary, limited Internet service.”

Anyone who has been online in the past couple of days can confirm that the recent cut in undersea cables in the Mediterranean has once again stymied the digital flow to Saudi Arabia and neighboring countries. And involved companies are saying not to expect any improvement on their part before Thursday, and that connectivity may be hampered for the rest of the month.

Meanwhile, Saudi Internet service providers (ISPs) are scrambling to obtain more bandwidth from alternative channels.
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