Countries across the Middle East are sans Internet connections due to a cable break on Wednesday. Two lessons: The Internet in some areas lack redundancy and telecommunications infrastructure is weak. And companies that outsource customer service operations offshore need to plan ahead.
Egypt’s Minister of Communications and Information Technology on Wednesday formed an emergency task force to fix a cable that cut off Internet services and international communications in the Middle East. In the U.S., this outage abroad wouldn’t be a big deal–until your customer service operations mostly housed offshore go down.