Many parts of Asia, the Middle East and north Africa are without Internet access for a second consecutive day after a cable was cut on the bed of the Mediterranean between Italy and Egypt yesterday. A ship’s anchor is thought to have been responsible.

The accident led to major disruptions in the Internet supply for Egypt, Bahrain, Dubai, Kuwait, and as far a field as India.

Many of the region’s emerging economies rely heavily on Internet access to do business with the West. As a result companies are now struggling to cope.

India’s Internet bandwidth, for example, has been sliced in half, leaving its lucrative outsourcing industry trying to reroute traffic to satellites and other cables through Asia.

And even worse news came today when engineers said the repair could take up to two weeks.

Now just imagine if the Internet went down in north America and Europe for two weeks. Would we be able to cope?