This is one of those stories that you don’t hear about until it’s too late. It’s like the beginning of a war movie with ultra-secret black ops plots and complicated domino schemes.

In less than a week, no less than four undersea cables to the UAE (United Arab Emirates) have been severed, severely disrupting Internet access and crippling businesses and some government operations for a number of middle eastern and Asian countries. Just *snip* — cut, after years of perfect operation. Four in a week. And things are reportedly “beginning to get suspicious.”

Beginning to get suspicious? I think we’re way past suspicious. Is it just me, or does this seem like one of the unsung ways in which the third world war might start? I see deep sea divers with acetylene torches…

OK, I’m sure I’m overdramatizing. At least I hope I am. But this is clearly serious. Imagine if Internet access in the US went down — credit cards wouldn’t work, banks would be more or less frozen, the stock market couldn’t function, and the government would function even less than it does already, to say nothing of everything you personally depend on the Internet for every day. And imagine that the cause of it wasn’t just a power outage or something, but because four critical cables had been individually cut.

Internet traffic is being rerouted through other cables for the time being, but they’re strained to capacity and apparently not everything is completely operational. It will be interesting to see how this turns out, that’s for sure.