What caused the disruptions? Finding five accidental failures in a week a bit hard to swallow, conspiracy theorists were quick to claim sabotage. But the cable operators and the International Telecommunication Union insisted the most likely culprit was an errant boat anchor. And their argument seemed to be borne out when an abandoned anchor was discovered near the second cable to be cut.

But now it appears the ITU itself may be finding the errant-anchor theory a bit suspect. With repairs completed on four of the five cables, the ITU has presumably been able to perform a fair bit of analysis on the cables at issue here, and it’s not convinced that it was Mother Nature who damaged them. “We do not want to pre-empt the results of ongoing investigations, but we do not rule out that a deliberate act of sabotage caused the damage to the undersea cables over two weeks ago,” Sami al-Murshed, head of the ITU, told Agence France-Presse. “Some experts doubt the prevailing view that the cables were cut by accident, especially as the cables lie at great depths under the sea and are not passed over by ships.”

Undersea Internet cable damage is hardly unusual, but four five cables severed in one week? Seems a bit odd, doesn’t it? Last Wednesday, two cables in the Mediterranean were cut, disrupting Internet traffic from Egypt to India. On Friday, a third cable was cut, this one in the Persian Gulf, off the coast of the United Arab Emirates. Then a fourth cable, also off the coast of the UAE, has been compromised.

Initially, authorities thought that a wayward ship might have cut the cables with its anchor, but that theory was dismissed by the Egyptian government over the weekend. Turns out there were no ships in the area at the time the cables were severed. “The ministry’s maritime transport committee reviewed footage covering the period of 12 hours before and 12 hours after the cables were cut and no ships sailed the area,” Egypt’s transport ministry explained. “The area is also marked on maps as a no-go zone and it is therefore ruled out that the damage to the cables was caused by ships.”

So what caused it? A submarine? An unseen enemy? The NSA? Or something far more sinister … Architeuthis TCP/IP?

UPDATE Feb. 5: Looks like the fourth cable may not have been cut, but taken offline.

UPDATE Feb. 5: Khaleej Times reports that a fifth cable has been damaged.