The reason of the damage has not yet been identified, but there were reports of seismic activity near Malta around teh same time the outage started.

The cables have not been completely cut, but have been damaged to a degree affecting a high number of the individual fibers within the three cables. France Telecom provides further details about the effect of this outage onto connectivity between the different regions in a press release:

Most of the B to B traffic between Europe and Asia is rerouted through the USA.
Traffic from Europe to Algeria and Tunisia is not affected, but traffic from Europe to the Near East and Asia is interrupted to a greater or lesser extent (see country list below).
Part of the internet traffic towards Réunion is affected as well as 50% towards Jordan.
A first appraisal at 7:44 am UTC gave an estimate of the following impact on the voice traffic (in percentage of out of service capacity):
-    Saudi Arabia: 55% out of service
-    Djibouti: 71% out of service
-    Egypt: 52% out of service
-    United Arab Emirates: 68% out of service
-    India: 82% out of service
-    Lebanon: 16% out of service
-    Malaysia: 42% out of service
-    Maldives: 100% out of service
-    Pakistan: 51% out of service
-    Qatar: 73% out of service
-    Syria: 36% out of service
-    Taiwan: 39% out of service
-    Yemen: 38% out of service
-    Zambia: 62% out of service

France Telecom immediately alerted one of the two maintenance boats based in the Mediterranean area, the “Raymond Croze”. This France Telecom Marine cable ship based at Seyne-sur-Mer has received its mobilization order early this afternoon and will cast off tonight at 3:00 am with 20 kilometers spare cable on board. It should be on location on Monday morning for a relief mission.
Priority will be given to the recovery of the Sea Me We4 cable, then on the Sea Me We3.
By December 25th, Sea Me We4 could be operating. By December 31st, the situation should be back to normal.

The outage has been picked up by a number of news websites. Here are some examples:

BBC News: Severed cable disrupts web access
Bloomberg News: Severed Cables in Mediterranean Disrupt Communication

During the last weekend (Memorial day weekend) the website of the very popular Internet Television network Revision3 were down during many hours following a massive DoS (Denial of Service) attack

Jim Louderback, CEO of Revision3 has provided a detailed write-up of last the event. It is for sure an interesting read, and the story is far more interesting as it might look like on a first view. DoS attacks are nothing unusual these days, but this case is different. The Revision 3 guys investigated over the past days to identify the source of the attack, hoping to get a better understanding would would have an interest in bringing down their services. The IP addresses at the source of the DoS attack belong to a rather “famous” subsidiary of Artistdirect: MediaDefender.

MediaDefender has been known in the past for their sometimes highly discussed efforts to “fight” the spreading of illegally traded copyrighted material, especially through peer-to-peer networks.

After talking to MediaDefender, they admitted that they were abusing Revision3s torrent tracker (which is used purely to distribute Revision3s own shows) by injecting a broad array of torrents into the tracker, without the knowledge of Revision3.

Jim Louderback describes the situation the following way in his post on the Revision3 blog:

It’s as if McGruff the Crime Dog snuck into our basement, enlisted an army of cellar rats to eat up all of our cheese, and then burned the house down when we finally locked him out – instead of just knocking on the front door to tell us the window was open

Louderback also confirmed that the FBI is investigating and that “it’s far more serious than toddlers squabbling over broken toys and lost cookies.”

Read the full post here.

The RIPE NCC has recently published a case study of the events which gives a detailed inside view of the event using existing tools provided by RIPE.

Among other information, like a detailed time line of the events, the guys at RIPE also provide the following video which illustrates different stages of the outages using BGPlay:

You can read the case study here.