…the power of Mercury Retrograde (which began on January 28th and will go direct on February 19th), read on:

UBAI, United Arab Emirates (CNN) — Large swathes of Asia, the Middle East and north Africa had their high-technology services crippled Thursday following a widespread Internet failure which brought many businesses to a standstill and left others struggling to cope.

One major telecommunications provider blamed the outage, which started Wednesday, on a major undersea cable failure in the Mediterranean.

India’s Internet bandwidth has been sliced in half, The Associated Press reported, leaving its lucrative outsourcing industry trying to reroute traffic to satellites and other cables through Asia.

Reports say that Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Bahrain are also experiencing severe problems.

Nations that have been spared the chaos include Israel — whose traffic uses a different route — and Lebanon and Iraq. Many Middle East governments have backup satellite systems in case of cable failure.

Mercury Retrograde affects all forms of communications (internet and computer systems, cell phones, fax machines, conversations, relationships, et al.), automobiles, any machine that uses parts or components that must communicate within itself in order to function, and other crucial elements of our every day life. Never sign an important contract during these retrograde periods, as the terms of that agreement will come back to haunt you in a not-so-good way somewhere down the road.

If you’ve been experiencing odd phenomena (for instance, in the first days of the MercRetro period, I tend to get the “dropsies,” which means that I have a horrible case of fumble-fingers. Everything hits the floor, or I stub my toe repeatedly, or accidentally bite my tongue (or the inside of my cheek)… You get the picture?) you can be certain that pesky Mercury going backward on us is the culprit!

Good luck. You’ll need it.