Internet access in India improved Friday as international service providers shifted their Internet traffic to cables under the Pacific Ocean to bypass two undersea cables damaged earlier this week.

The two cables deep under the Mediterranean Sea snapped on Wednesday 1.30.2008, disrupting service since then across a swath of Asia and the Middle East.

India took one of the biggest hits, and the damage from its slowdowns and outages rippled to some U.S. and European companies that rely on its lucrative outsourcing industry to handle customer service calls and other operations.

Bandwidth providers in India said they were working to restore service to about 80 percent of its usual speed Friday.

In Egypt, Internet access remained sporadic or nonexistent Friday, the first day of the official Muslim weekend in the Middle East when all government offices and most businesses are closed. Egyptian Minister of Communications and Information Technology Tarek Kamil said service would be up to about 80 percent of its usual capacity within 48 hours.

The pair of cables — which lie on the sea floor near each other and at some points are no thicker than the average human thumb — caused problems across an area thousands of miles wide. India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Bahrain all reported trouble.