Millions had connectivity impaired by five cut/damaged undersea Internet cables in the last few weeks. John Robb, my guru on such things and the author of Brave New War, thinks this was probably a dry run if it was intentional.

"If this was a real attack rather than a series of accidents (the geographical concentration is interesting in this regard), then this was likely a capabilities test that yielded data on response times, impact, and duration."

Boing Boing readers are betting on monsters, see above poster.

Should sea monsters not be blamed, let's start thinking of Skype's infrastructure as high value targets, like phone, mobile and data networks. When martial law was declared in Pakistan last year, the government seized control of television, radio, newspapers, ISPs, phone and mobile phone operations. I'm betting Skype will join that media-suppression checklist in the next few years.

Skype directory census is fed by connected Skype users in the cloud. Headcounts for affected regions will fall slowly over the next few weeks, rising again as regions reconnect.

Has your connectivity been hurt by the outage? Has your work? Do you know people affected?