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What I see from our Cogent transit is that Egypt has completely fallen off the map, with a normally consistent traffic gone to zero, but traffic to Iran, Iraq, the GCC, India and Pakistan and even Yemen doesn't seem to be affected, at least not noticeably.
Regards
Marshall
while i very much appreciate the compliment, this work was all done by
my colleagues at renesys earl zmijewski and alin popescu. i've been
following the routing events around this cable break, though.
there are some interesting findings here about who (what carriers,
what countries) were critically dependant on these cable systems.
we'll probably put some more effort into analyzing this situation as
it develops and compare it to the taiwan outages that hit late 2006.
(nanog program plug: my colleague martin a brown will be presenting
and update on the way that the taiwan quake outages continue to affect
transit and peering patterns in asia over a year after the original
cable breaks: http://nanog.org/mtg-0802/brown.html . if you're
interested in this subject you should probably register for nanog42 (
https://www.nanog.org/registration/ ) and attend.)
if there's enough interest in this event, we'll do a lighting talk
<plug type="another">
lighting talk submissions are already open at: http://nanogpc.org/lighting
</plug>
we'll monitor the situation and this community's level of interest and
allocate our energies accordingly. 
see y'all in sjc.
t.
In the Med/IO cable case, a ship dropped an anchor on the cable,
something that is 1:1,000,000 shot, but happens. At least they know
where it is. The failure to contract the maintenance ship tighter on a
route that turns out to be "that vulnerable" is probably of concer for
users of that cable now as well. A lot of the impact is likely also
due to people not buying protect circuits or bothering to understand
the IP architecture. That is something that is becoming common
globally, IMHO. Folks assume that IP will route around the damage.
Sure it will, if all the physical layer paths aren't busted. Layer 1
really does "rock".
Watching BGP announcements seems "less important" in these erious
performance impacting cases, to me, than understanding the underlying
architecture and what the root cause a half step above the anchor and
a half a step below the advertisement was.
Looking forward to Rod Beck's response.
Best,
Marty
an FYI for anyone looking to do hosting/connectivity to Dubai or the UAE:
there are only two providers in the UAE, etisalat and du.
while du is either completely offline, or pushing all its traffic across
what appeared to be single dial-up ISDN link 8^), etisalat seems largely
uneffected. (connectivity from my du connected office was barely useable,
while my du connected residence was completely offline, connectivity from my
etisalat connected co-lo and etisalat connected office are operating pretty
much at norm, which is to say, not quite what i'd expect for north america,
but quite acceptable for the region)
the downside is that du is the "progressive" provider, while etisalat continues
to filter and block various and sundry sites and facilities based on complaints
from its more conservative customers (porn, dating sites, and social
networking sites like facebook/etc) and techno-political bents (ie. many
sites relative to VoIP and web proxies are blocked)