Call Centers have been affected by the damage of Undersea Cables

An earthquake off Taiwan, measuring 6.7-7.1 on the Richter scale, knocked out Internet links to India for 20-25 minutes and affected Reliance Communications’ FLAG and VSNL’s SEA-ME-WE-3 under-sea cable systems, even as telecommunications around Asia was severely disrupted, with Internet services slowing and financial transactions being hindered, particularly in the currency market. However, BPO and IT services across India remained largely unaffected.

Internet services have been disrupted in large parts of the Middle East and India following damage to two undersea cables in the Mediterranean. There was disruption to 70% of the nationwide network in Egypt, and India suffered up to 60% disruption.

UK firms such as British Airways have told the BBC that call centers have been affected by the outage.

Industry experts said it could take up to one week to repair the damaged cables and resume full service.

International telephone calls, which have also been affected, are being rerouted to work around the problem.

Neither of the cable operators have confirmed the cause or location of the outage but some reports suggest it was caused by a ship's anchor near the port of Alexandria in Egypt.

"Information technology companies, software companies and call centres that provide online services to the UK or the US east coast are the worst affected," Rajesh Chharia, president of the Internet Service Providers' Association of India, told Agence France-Presse (AFP).

India is the world leader in offshore outsourcing, with the remote servicing of IT or other business processes worth an estimated £24bn.