As we all know, the internet is a series of tubes, and the most important tubes lie on the ocean floor, carrying data by the boatload (so to speak) from country to country. These tubes can be disrupted, however, by anything from ship anchors to leaks to the same sort of server problems that bug the rest of us.
Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Manchester-based Dyn, which deals with network issues, had a blog post about this recently, discussing disruptions and additions of undersea cables around the world. It’s pretty seldom that you see somebody talk about the Siberian peninsula of Kamchatka unless they’re reminiscing about the game of Risk. He also touches on the Marshall Islands; you can’t accuse the guy of having geographic tunnel vision.