Backhoe in Kazakhstan cuts Irad off for nine hours

TALAS — A backhoe digging on a construction site in Kazakhstan cut a fiber-optic cable carrying Attelkom's international traffic on Tuesday, leaving the ISEZ without access to the international internet for nine hours, the company said yesterday.

Calls and text messages within the ISEZ were not affected, but websites hosted abroad, internet calls and some card payments through foreign networks failed from mid-morning until the early evening. Attelkom said that all its international traffic passes through two fiber routes into Kazakhstan and one into Uzbekistan, and that traffic should have been switched to the remaining links. The switchover did not work as intended, and the company said it was investigating why. The cable was repaired by the Kazakh operator.

It was not the first such cut. Business groups said the outage showed how exposed the zone is to accidents and decisions across its borders, and called for further international routes. Attelkom said it was studying new capacity and would publish the findings of its investigation.