NEW DELHI — At least for a while, the World Wide Web wasn't so worldwide.

Two cables that carry Internet traffic deep under the Mediterranean Sea snapped, disrupting service yesterday across a swath of Asia and the Middle East. The cause of the damage was not yet known.

India took one of the biggest hits, and 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.

"There's definitely been a slowdown," said Anurag Kuthiala, a systems engineer at the New Delhi office of Symantec Corp., a U.S. security software maker. "We're able to work, but the system is very slow."

Although disruptions to larger U.S. firms were not widespread, the outage raised concerns about the vulnerability of Internet infrastructure. One analyst called it a "wake-up call."

The cables, lying underwater north of Egypt's port of Alexandria, snapped Wednesday just as the working day was ending in India, so the full impact was not apparent until yesterday.

There was speculation a ship's anchor might be to blame. The two cables, called FLAG Europe Asia and SEA-ME-WE 4, are in close proximity to each other.

Egyptian officials said initial attempts to reach the cables were stymied by poor weather. Repairs could take a week once workers get there, and engineers were scrambling to reroute traffic to satellites and other cables.

The Egyptian minister of communications said Internet service in that country had been restored to about 45 percent and would be up to 80 percent by today.

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

But in India, which earns billions of dollars a year from outsourcing, the loss of Internet access was potentially disastrous. The Internet Service Providers' Association of India said the country had lost half its capacity.

TeleGeography, a U.S. research group, said the disruption cut capacity by 75 percent on the route from the Mideast to Europe.

Large-scale disruptions have happened before. East Asia suffered nearly two months of outages and slow service after an earthquake damaged undersea cables near Taiwan in 2006.

In the Mideast, outages caused a slowdown in traffic on Dubai's stock exchange late Wednesday. The exchange was back up yesterday, but many Middle Eastern businesses were still experiencing difficulties.

With two of the three cables that pass through the Suez Canal cut, Internet traffic from the Middle East and India intended for Europe had to reroute eastward, around most of the globe.

In India, the Internet was sluggish, with some users unable to connect at all and others left frustrated by spotty service.

Analysts said India has built up massive amounts of bandwidth in recent years and will likely recover without major economic losses. Larger companies with sophisticated backups appeared to weather the outages well — but smaller firms could lose business if full Internet access was not quickly restored.

Mustafa Alani, an analyst at the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center, said the outage should be a "wake-up call" on better protecting vital infrastructure.

"This shows how easy it would be to attack" vital networks, such as the Internet, mobile phones and electronic banking and government services.

Wednesday's damage apparently wasn't deliberate — but it could have been, he said, adding that "when it comes to great technology, it's not about building it, it's how to protect it."