Fibre cuts the Mediterranean were reported by many sources including the BBC, also Blomberg News, Al Jazeera, Orange and Wired on December 19th 2009, also see the article in Wikipedia. We decided to have a look at the impact on ping performance using the PingER data.
For performance issues following the previous Mediterranean fibre cut see:
https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/Effects+of+Fibre+Outage+through+Mediterranean
Affected Countries
From Orange at http://www.orange.com/en_EN/press/press_releases/cp081219en.html
France Telecom observed that 3 major underwater cables were cut: "Sea Me We 4" at 7:28am, "Sea Me We3" at 7:33am and FLAG at 8:06am.
The causes of the cut, which is located in the Mediterranean between Sicily and Tunisia, on sections linking Sicily to Egypt, remain unclear.Most of the B to B traffic between Europe and Asia is rerouted through the USA.
Traffic from Europe to Algeria and Tunisia is not affected, but traffic from Europe to the Near East and Asia is interrupted to a greater or lesser extent (see country list below).
Part of the internet traffic towards Réunion is affected as well as 50% towards Jordan.
A first appraisal at 7:44 am UTC gave an estimate of the following impact on the voice traffic (in percentage of out of service capacity):
- Saudi Arabia: 55% out of service
- Djibouti: 71% out of service
- Egypt: 52% out of service
- United Arab Emirates: 68% out of service
- India: 82% out of service
- Lebanon: 16% out of service
- Malaysia: 42% out of service
- Maldives: 100% out of service
- Pakistan: 51% out of service
- Qatar: 73% out of service
- Syria: 36% out of service
- Taiwan: 39% out of service
- Yemen: 38% out of service
- Zambia: 62% out of service
Maps of the cables and the affected countries can be found at SEAMEWE3 and SEAMEWE4. A Telegoegrpahy map of the cable routes in the Mediterranean is seen below: 
Losses
The measured effects on the losses seen from N. America (SLAC in California) to hosts in N. Africa (Egypt, Sudan); Middle East (Bahrein, Palestine, UAE, Oman, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudia Arabia); S. Asia (Sri Lanka, Maldives, Pakistan) are huge. As seen from PingER daily loss data measured from SLAC, comparing the losses on Friday Dec 19 with those on Mon-Thu (15-18 Dec) the losses have increased by a factor of 5 to 30 times for most of the hosts monitored in the above countries.
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