I still say it's aliens. Or my neighbor...

Update on the Great Undersea Cable Cutting Conspiracy. As repair begins on the cables, a little actual information is trickling into the press.

Several of these cables have been cut over the last week, disrupting Internet connectivity in some countries in the Middle East and Asia. And this has got the conspiracy theorists working overtime. There’s some disagreement over how many cables have been cut: Beckert says it’s three; most news reports put it at four or five; this guy says it’s at least nine (although he’s also written books about alien-inhabited undersea bases, which we suppose also explains how the cables are getting cut.)

The other day we wrote that the most likely explanation was an errant boat anchor. And, indeed, we’ve just received word that Flag Telecom, which operates the cable that was cut between Dubai and Oman, found an abandoned five-ton anchor at the scene. We did allow that there was a chance – albeit slight – that the cables were cut by sharks with laser beams on their heads. But by and large, our goal was to persuade people to take off the tinfoil.

That didn’t stop BizTech readers from contributing conspiracy theories of their own. There were some obvious ones – the CIA, Mossad, Islamic terrorists – and some that we hadn’t thought of — Godzilla, Gamera and the monster from Cloverfield. Our favorite theory: “The citizens of Atlantis are pissed off about pollution, overfishing, and destruction of undersea habitat, and they aren’t going to take it any more!” [More]

Either that or the evil forces that cut my phone cable every few months. Of course, that mostly involves bored roadside mowers and hidden junction boxes.