Internet companies in the Middle East were still trying to restore connections for their customers today after an undersea cable the width of a human finger was severed, bringing down networks in the region.

Two of the most important cables carrying internet traffic from Europe to South Asia were cut by a ship's anchor off the coast of Alexandria on Wednesday, disrupting internet traffic and phone services in Egypt, Kuwait and as far away as Pakistan.

In Kuwait, one internet service provider (ISP) experienced a 100 per cent outage of its network, while in Egypt and Pakistan several lost more than 70 per cent of their coverage, forcing operators to to redirect traffic along other routes.

"Everyone is trying to absorb the shock," Joseph Metry, a network supervisor at Orascom Telecom Holding SAE, one of the largest phone companies in the Middle East and North Africa, was quoted as saying.

The two cables, known as the Flag and SEA-ME-WEA-4 respectively, carry approximately 70 per cent of the internet traffic between Europe and the Middle East, but despite their importance are only just over a centimetre thick each.

Today there were reports that a third cable had been cut, compounding internet providers' woes, though the cause was unknown.

It is understood that the first two cables were broken after a severe weather warning in the Mediterranean Sea forced weather officials in Egypt to tell ships in the vicinity of Alexandria to drop their anchors. Two of the 40 ships that were nearby are thought to have unwittingly dropped their anchors directly on top of the cables, which are buried only 50cm beneath the surface and can easily be snagged.

Accordingly to Renesys, a company which monitors the web's performance globally, the severance of the cables "greatly impacted" phone and internet services to the Middle East, and repair time would likely be measured "in weeks not days."

Flag, which is owned by Reliance, the Indian telecommunications giant, and SEA-ME-WEA-4, which is run by a consortium of telecommunications companies, could not be reached for comment today, but a spokesman for Flag was quoted by Bloomberg as saying that a repair operation would begin on Monday.

Egyptian telecommunications companies said that traffic was being routed along other cables in the Suez in the meantime, but that customers could still expect to experience delays in peak periods as 'bottlenecks' were created.

AT&T and Verizon, the American operators, also said their networks had also been affected by the break, but weren't able to give details.

Paolo Rosa, a spokesman for the International Telecommunications Union, said that submarine cables were prone to being affected by earthquakes, fishing equiment, and anchors, but that in areas of high risk, particularly near coastlines, they often split in two so that traffic could be re-routed in the event of damage.

Bob Greenfield, chairman of the UK Cable Protection Committee, which negotiates with the fishing industry on behalf of British telcos, said that often cables were snapped by the beams that boats use to keep their fishing nets open, and which frequently drag along the seabed.

"A big anchor will also do it - mostly it's just bad luck," Mr Greenfield said. "There are charts which show the routes of all the cables so that ships don't interfere with them, but sometimes they forget their anchors are down."

The cables, which cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build, were made of fibre-optic material, and would have been " just a bit bigger than the width of a finger," he said.

In 2006, a deep-sea earthquake in the Luzon Strait, off the coast of Taiwan, wreaked havoc with internet connections in China for weeks, and triggered disruptions as far away as the United States.

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