Connecting with the right excuse

For commuters using the UK’s rail network autumn mornings would be sprinkled with late running trains. The standard, slightly baffling excuse would be that there were leaves on the line. Retailers, explaining a poor season’s sales, often fob off investors with the excuse that the weather was ‘wrong’, either too rainy or too sunny.
For Middle East telecom providers there is standard go-to line when services are disrupted: ‘damage to underwater cables’. A cable in the Mediterranean was damaged last week causing a slow down in internet connection speeds across the region. This was followed by damage to a cable off the coast of Dubai, and then another off Qatar. If one is bad luck, and two is careless, what does that make three?

In a region not given to public information announcements, maybe we should be grateful the telecom operators have even offered an excuse. But it is becoming tiresome. They used the same line last year when a cable was damaged off India. Would it be too much to ask them to explain how these cables are damaged, how they are repaired and how they plan to safeguard connections in the future?