A third underwater fiber-optic cable was cut today in the Persian Gulf, off the coast of Dubai, United Arab Emirates, according to its owner Flag Telecom, compounding Internet problems in the Middle East and India, the BBC reported today.

The third cable, known as the Falcon cable, comes after breaks in two cables off the Mediterranean seacoast on Wednesday.

Those breaks required carriers to reroute Internet traffic from the U.S. to India and other nations in the Middle East the other way around the world, across the Pacific Ocean, leading to some Internet delays.

The cause of the first two breaks is believed to be a result of a ship's anchor that dragged and snapped the cables, and a similar cause might be involved in the third incident. Flag Telecom will start repairs next week on one of the first two cables linking Egypt and Italy, the company said today. A repair ship is expected to reach the site of the damage, 8.3 kilometers (about five miles) from Alexandria, Egypt, on Tuesday. The repair will take a week to complete.

The breaks on Wednesday were to the Flag Telecom Europe-Asia cable, owned by India's Reliance Communications Ltd., and on the South East Asia-Middle East-West Europe 4 (SEA-ME-WE 4) cable, owned by a consortium that includes Verizon Communications Inc. in New York. The cable damage disrupted the Internet and other communications to the Middle East and India.

Flag said the Europe-Asia cable was cut at 8 a.m. GMT on Wednesday. The company also said it was able to restore circuits to some customers and was switching to alternative routes for others.