Middle-East Internet Outage Has Little Affect on Industry

CYBERSPACE — The accidental cutting of two undersea tables disrupted Internet access across the middle east this week, including India, Pakistan, Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Bahrain.

The nations involved in the mishap account for about 1.5 billion of the world's population – but the adult Internet industry seems to have been little affected.

An informal survey of adult industry professionals on the web indicated that despite the widespread nature of the problem, the adult industry remains largely unaffected because of the taboo nature of adult entertainment in the middle east.

But what about India, that hotbed of tech-job outsourcing? Despite the fact that many mainstream companies have had their customer-service call centers cut off from communication, the adult industry doesn't rely on such outsourcing. Ben of RageCash told XBIZ that he employs one all-purpose webmaster in India, but hasn't lost contact with that employee due to the disruption.

Fortunately, India has built up a surplus of bandwidth over the years to compensate for these kinds of complications, but smaller companies still might encounter problems because they lack the more sophisticated backup systems of the big companies.

Officials in charge of the repairs said the problems would continue through next week. In the meantime, officials said they will reroute Internet traffic in the region through satellites.

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