Around 11.15 AM on January 30, 2008, a ship's anchor apparently severed fibre optic cables between Palermo, Italy, and Alexandria, Egypt. Providers across the Middle East and as far as Pakistan were heavily affected with a significant slowdown of communications reported. The UAE telecommunications company and Dubai Internet City's internet service provider du was one of the worst hit, becoming completely inoperational for several hours. Since du has a monopoly in the Free Zones, customers had no alternative connectivity during the outage.