If you’re consumed by doubt over who killed President Kennedy, intrigued about whether or not the Pentagon was actually hit by a plane on 9/11, or if you’re still out to get Prince Philip for driving the white Fiat that took out Princess Diana, then the world of undersea cables is probably taking up a lot of your time at the moment.

Over the past week, four telecoms cables at the bottom of the sea connecting the Middle East and North Africa have “failed”, disrupting internet traffic and telecommunications – and hence electronic trade – in several countries across the region.

Broken undersea cables are, as you can imagine, not a frequent occurrence – but it does happen often enough to warrant a small fleet of repair ships ready to take action.

The unusual number and the particular geography of these problems have kept the internet conspiracists very happy.

First reports suggested that a trailing anchor had damaged a couple of co-located cables near Alexandria, until the Egyptian authorities denied the presence of any ships in that area.

Since then there have been suggestions of CIA dirty tricks, plans to spoil a new Iranian online oil exchange, or even botched attempts to install covert listening devices on the cables themselves.

Matt Walker, a senior analyst at Ovum RHK, gives a very good – and sensible - account of the likely circumstances:

“Of the four reported and confirmed failures, two are on cables in the Mediterranean, two in the Persian Gulf; at least one of these may be a power failure, not a cable cut, and hence the landing station is the likely culprit,’ he wrote.

“The Persian Gulf is shallow but the Mediterranean reaches depths of several kilometres not too far from the coast. Without knowing the exact depth of the Mediterranean outages, accidental damage from fishing/anchors/dredging is certainly possible there, and highly likely in the shallow Gulf. Four breaks in two separate locations in a single week are rare but hardly impossible, or proof of a conspiracy.

"To paraphrase Henry Kissinger, though, even the paranoid have enemies; there may indeed be something sinister lurking. Even if all the outages occurred in shallow water, that doesn't prove that accidental damage from, e.g., a fishing trawler, was the cause, but merely suggests it was physically possible. Intentional sabotage is, after all, probably more feasibly done in shallow waters than deep, and cable security in shallow waters is only modestly more practical. Clearly, undersea cables are a ripe target for those with an interest in wreaking havoc on international communications, whatever their motivation. Another consideration is that undersea cables have been used for submarine/surface surveillance purposes as far back as World War II, with the cooperation of private industry,” he said.

Walker concluded: “In my view, the most likely outcome of this is that a credible explanation for the coincidence will be presented soon, and a few weeks from now, all will be forgotten.”

Believe what you will. The most significant aspect of this incident is to highlight the critical importance that the internet plays in global trade, even in developing nations such as Egypt.

The fact that a temporary and relatively minor disruption to that service in a pressure-cooker region of the world has produced such an outburst of conspiratorial hand-wringing shows that the internet is well and truly as much a part of international relations and political diplomacy as it is central to the corporate IT strategy.