4G?

data

Cellphone data haha

Maybe he went to a friends house, who uses a different provider?

WI-FI hot spots.

It's called a "Cell Phone"... it's a pretty new invention in some parts of the world... perhaps your country will catch up to the 20th century some day

Pretty easily actually. It's happened in America too. You bury your cords far below the ground and hope nothing bad happens. You aren't going to multiply your costs by 10 by putting steel plates around your internet cords to protect them. It's much more cost affective to wait until they get cut (which happens very very rarely) and repair it overnight.

You think they should maybe have guards watching every yard of cable - even the bits underwater?

Hmmmm telecom towers can have problems!!!

Its from Saudi Arabia, however I found a new article from today reporting a fibre optics cable failure causing massive outage in Pakistan, is likely the same provider

Maybe they switched to a different provider.

It's not like it's the internet providers fault that their cable got cut. The same thing happened here in America about 5 years ago. Everyone's internet was slowed to a crawl and Netflix was inoperable. That was just from 1 major cable being cut by a backhoe in someone's backyard...