The latest Akamai State of the Internet report is out, with its voluminous data about global Internet speeds, attack traffic, and IPv4/v6 usage in the first quarter of 2011. What the Internet server company's survey also reveals is that in some countries, obtaining 'Net access has been a pretty messy affair recently.

"Internet outages or disruptions of note occurred in several countries around the world due to government action in response to protests, natural disasters, or oddly enough, simply scavenging for scrap metal," the Akamai survey observes. Those disruptions were particularly noticeable in Egypt, Libya, Japan, and Georgia/Armenia, where a retiree hunting for scrap metal managed to bring 'Net access down for a while.

What is striking about several of them is that Internet traffic sometimes increased after the disruptive event.

Japan's earthquake

As Ars readers know, on March 11, the Tohoku-Oki earthquake struck Japan. Estimated at a magnitude of nine on the Richter Scale, the temblor was one of the biggest in recorded history, with disastrous consequences for that country's Fukushima nuclear reactors.

With around 100,000 servers deployed in 72 countries around the world, Akamai monitors global 'Net conditions via what it calls its "Intelligent Internet Platform(tm)." As the graphic below indicates, immediately after the earthquake, Akamai traffic sent to Japan fell by about 27 percent.

But even though the telecommunications service KDDI sustained some damage to its undersea cables, Japan's regular throughput rates recovered quickly, and then some.

"While not shown in the figure, Akamai's monitoring indicated that in the days after the earthquake, the peak levels for traffic delivered to Japan were higher than those seen prior to the earthquake," the report notes, "likely due to Japanese citizens turning to the Internet for updated news and information on the disaster, as well as in efforts to find and communicate with friends and family."

This pattern of recovery conforms to studies indicating that BitTorrent use in Japan was also back to normal in a few days, after varying by about 25 percent around March 11.

Egypt's revolution

Facing widespread civil unrest, Egypt's now deposed authoritarian government resorted to a desperate measure. The regime told that country's four major ISPs to close down all international connections to cyberspace.

"As shown in Figure 29 [below], the volume of traffic being delivered by Akamai to users in Egypt dropped precipitously concurrent with these providers being shut down, and remained at near-zero levels for the duration of the outage," the report explains.

But as with Japan, once Internet access was restored, traffic peaked at slightly higher levels "likely related to pent-up demand for news, social networking, and other types of content from Egyptian users."

Libya's civil war

Political unrest in Egypt quickly spread to its neighbor Libya, which is now engulfed in a full-scale civil war. In the case of various Internet disruptions that took place in Libya in mid-February and March, traffic didn't quickly recover to its normal rates.

"The graph of Akamai traffic delivered into Libya during the two week February 14-28 period [shown below], has two clearly identifiable outage periods during the 18th-20th, and the peak traffic levels after those outages were a fraction of those seen in the days before," the survey discloses—about 60 to 80 percent of the rate prior to the outages. An even longer disruption took place in March.

Georgia/Armenia's scrap metal snafu

Not all of these outages were caused by earthquakes or revolutions. According to reports, in late March, a 75-year-old Georgian woman foraging for scrap metal allegedly sawed into a fiber-optic connection owned by that country's Georgian Railway Telecom utility. The accident swiftly caused a hefty chunk of Internet users in Georgia and neighboring Armenia to lose their broadband service for a spell.

"I have no idea what the Internet is," the pensioner told reporters after her arrest by authorities.

The chart below shows the disruptions in traffic that Akamai observed in Georgia and Armenia between March 26 and 31.

The Internet may be getting faster. Smartphones may be selling at record rates. But as this Akamai survey indicates, the bleep still hits the digital fan on occasion.

It's not all bad news, however. Here's something to look forward to. Coming up in Akamai's second quarter 2011 survey—an analysis of the streaming of Prince William and Catherine Middleton's royal wedding, "which broke traffic records on sites across the Web."