Red Sea Cable Cuts: The Hidden Crisis Threatening Global Internet Infrastructure
Breaking: Microsoft Azure Hit by Critical Red Sea Cable Damage
September 6, 2025 - Microsoft Corporation announced that clients of its Azure cloud platform are experiencing increased latency after multiple international cables in the Red Sea were cut, with traffic traversing through the Middle East that originates or ends in Asia or Europe being affected. The disruption began at 05:45 UTC and has forced one of the world's largest cloud providers to reroute traffic through alternate paths, causing higher-than-normal latencies for millions of users globally.
Microsoft's engineering teams are actively managing the interruption via diverse capacity and traffic rerouting, while also discussing alternate capacity options and providers in the region. The company warned that undersea fiber cuts can take time to repair and committed to providing daily updates as conditions evolve.
This latest incident represents just the most recent in a series of devastating attacks on one of the world's most critical internet chokepoints - a pattern that reveals the startling vulnerability of our global digital infrastructure.
The Red Sea: A Digital Chokepoint Under Siege
The Red Sea has become a battleground for global internet connectivity, with over 30 telecom companies including Huawei, SubCom, Orange, and Google investing $10.43 billion in laying 18 undersea cables in the Red Sea between 2000 and 2024. This narrow waterway serves as a critical data highway connecting Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
Recent Catastrophic Damage:
- February 2024: A UK-owned vessel struck by a Houthi-fired missile sank in the Red Sea, with its dragging anchor damaging the Asia Africa Europe-1 (AAE-1), Europe India Gateway (EIG), and SEACOM cables, disrupting 25% of traffic between Asia, Europe, and the Middle East
- March 2025: The PEACE submarine cable system was cut 1,450 km from Zafaranaat, Egypt, requiring several months to repair
- September 2025: Multiple new cable cuts force Microsoft Azure to implement emergency traffic rerouting
Out of more than 15 submarine cables in the Red Sea, four major systems have been severed, affecting 25% of traffic flow between Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. The impacted cables include some of the world's most important data arteries: Seacom, TGN, AAE-1, and EIG systems.
The Invisible Backbone: Understanding Undersea Cable Infrastructure
The Scale of Our Digital Dependence
Most people are completely unaware that their daily digital lives depend on a hidden network of cables lying on the ocean floor. Submarine cables carry 99% of the data traffic across the oceans, including all internet traffic, military transmissions, and financial transactions. To put this in perspective:
- Capacity: The total carrying capacity of a submarine cable is in the terabits per second, while a satellite typically offers only 1 gigabit per second - a ratio of more than 1000 to 1
- Efficiency: More than 95% of all data that moves around the world goes through these undersea cables
- Speed: A terabit per second is fast enough to transmit about a dozen two-hour, 4K HD movies in an instant
The Physical Reality
As of early 2025, there are over 1.48 million kilometers of submarine cables in service globally, with more than 600 active and planned submarine cables. These cables are surprisingly modest in appearance - typically as wide as a garden hose, with glass fibers roughly the diameter of a human hair carrying light signals.
The engineering behind these systems is remarkable. Each cable contains multiple optical fibers bundled and encased in protective layers designed to withstand harsh ocean conditions, with repeaters installed at intervals to amplify signals over long distances.
Economic and Strategic Implications
Financial Impact
The economic stakes couldn't be higher. Subsea cables have been credited with increasing access to high-speed internet worldwide, fueling economic growth, boosting employment, enabling innovation, and lowering barriers to trade. When cables fail, the ripple effects are massive:
- Africa Hit Hard: Of the 28 participant countries in the four damaged Red Sea cables, 17 are African, with approximately 100 million people in over a dozen West and North African countries negatively impacted
- Extended Outages: Ghana, Liberia and Côte d'Ivoire experienced internet outages lasting seven to ten days
- Repair Costs: The Houthi attacks disrupted data traffic by damaging cables worth approximately $3.5 billion
Geopolitical Weaponization
The criticality of cable services makes their geopolitical influence profound, with scholars arguing that state dominance in cable networks can exert political pressure or shape global internet governance. The Red Sea incidents highlight how regional conflicts can have global digital consequences.
Vulnerability and Security Challenges
The Fragility Factor
Based on an analysis of 44 publicly reported cable damages in 2024 and 2025, three factors very likely increase the likelihood of significant outages: lack of redundancy in cable networks, lack of diversity of cable routes, and limited global repair capacity.
Annual Damage Statistics:
- Each year, an estimated 100 to 150 undersea cables are cut, primarily accidentally by fishing equipment or anchors
- An estimated 100 to 150 cables are severed each year—mostly from fishing equipment or anchors
- Worldwide, about 200 undersea cables have been cut or disrupted annually as of 2024
Repair Challenges
The repair process is complex and time-consuming. The industry has been suffering from a shortage of repair ships, despite several new vessels entering service in the last 18 months. In conflict zones like the Red Sea, repairs are complicated by permit issues, weather, and ongoing regional conflicts.
State-Level Threats
Beyond accidental damage, the threats posed by state actors—particularly Russia and China—highlight the urgent need for measures to protect this infrastructure. Russian attention to transatlantic undersea cables has increased commensurately with NATO's perception of undersea cables' importance and vulnerability.
Russian Capabilities:
- The Losharik spy submarine likely had the deep-sea capability necessary to map or destroy undersea cables before being decommissioned in a 2019 fire
- The Yantar research vessel acts as a spy ship that could deploy underwater submersibles to attack and destroy cable sections
Chinese Influence:
- A 2020 Federal Communications Commission report referenced that HMN Technologies has "built or repaired" almost 25 percent of subsea cables
- Chinese investments in critical cable infrastructure involve approximately 25% of global submarine cables, such as the PEACE Cable linking East Africa and Europe
The Concentration Risk
Geographic Chokepoints
The Red Sea demonstrates how geographic chokepoints create systemic vulnerabilities. The relatively shallow waters in the Red Sea make the cables susceptible to acts of subversion and collateral damage, yet economic factors continue to drive investment in this route.
Cloud Provider Dependencies
The Microsoft Azure disruption illustrates how cloud computing has concentrated risk. Azure is the world's second largest cloud provider after Amazon's AWS, meaning that cable cuts in the Red Sea can impact millions of businesses and users who depend on cloud services for their operations.
Resilience and Redundancy: The Mixed Reality
Success Stories
Some regions have built impressive redundancy. With 17 submarine cables coming from all over the world and up to 14 distinct cable landing stations in 5 different cities, India has mostly diversified its digital traffic routes. The Red Sea Crisis showed this resilience, wherein India's digital connectivity remained unaffected despite having landing stations in all four affected cables.
Vulnerable Regions
However, regions with low redundancy, such as parts of West and Central Africa, isolated Pacific islands, and certain secondary European routes, are more likely to suffer disproportionate impact from cable damage.
The Future of Undersea Cable Security
Industry Response
The International Telecommunications Union established the International Advisory Body on Submarine Cable Resilience in October 2024, holding its first International Submarine Cable Resilience Summit in February 2025 in Nigeria. Additionally, 2024 ended with the formation of the first-ever United Nations Submarine Cable Advisory Group, whose main objective is to develop agreements on best practices to protect the world's submarine cables.
Investment Trends
Despite the risks, investment is accelerating. Some $11 billion in new cable builds is planned for 2024-26, double the amount in the previous three years, with internet giants accounting for the bulk of cable investment. Meta is planning to build a new $10-million fiber optic cable system spanning more than 40,000km around the world as the sole owner.
Route Diversification
Three US-financed trans-Pacific cable projects have been rerouted to avoid the South China Sea by crossing waters bordering Indonesia and the Philippines as a result of US lobbying, showing how geopolitical tensions are reshaping cable geography.
Recommendations for Resilience
For Governments
- Infrastructure Protection: Allied governments should step up efforts to protect this critical infrastructure from malicious activity, with NATO defense planners considering capability targets for surveillance ships and autonomous undersea drones
- Repair Capacity: Allies could consider policies to bolster the global fleet of cable repair vessels, which is both overstretched and informally organized
For Businesses
- Multi-Path Redundancy: Design systems with multiple cable routes and geographic diversity
- Cloud Strategy: Avoid single-cloud dependencies and implement multi-region architectures
- Contingency Planning: Develop protocols for cable outage scenarios
For the Industry
- Route Diversification: Invest in alternative paths that avoid geopolitical chokepoints
- Enhanced Monitoring: Implement better surveillance and early warning systems
- Rapid Repair: Expand the global fleet of cable repair vessels
The "New Internet": Can Starlink and Satellites Replace Undersea Cables?
As undersea cables face increasing threats, many wonder if satellite internet - particularly SpaceX's Starlink constellation - could provide a viable alternative to our vulnerable ocean-floor infrastructure.
The Promise of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) Satellites
Starlink represents a transformative leap in satellite communication, using a constellation of satellites positioned around 300 miles above Earth's surface - tens of thousands of miles closer than traditional geostationary satellites. This proximity offers several advantages:
Speed and Latency: Starlink's latency ranges between 25-50 milliseconds on land, dramatically better than traditional satellite internet which typically exceeds 500ms. However, this still falls short of cable internet's 11-19ms latency range.
Coverage: Starlink's expanding constellation aims to provide constant high-speed internet access anywhere on Earth, including remote areas where laying cables is impossible or economically unfeasible.
Resilience: Unlike submarine cables that can be cut by a single anchor or attack, satellite constellations offer inherent redundancy through distributed architecture.
The Capacity Reality Check
Despite Starlink's impressive capabilities, the physics of data transmission reveal significant limitations compared to submarine cables:
Capacity Comparison: Modern submarine cables like the MAREA cable can carry up to 200-224 terabits per second. Even with SpaceX's planned 42,000-satellite constellation, the combined satellite capacity cannot match a single major submarine cable system.
Bandwidth Density: Fiber-optic cables can support a ridiculous number (40+) of 100/200/400 GbE coherent modulated signals using Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM). Satellite-to-satellite laser links, while impressive, can realistically achieve 1-2 Tb/s but nothing near what's possible with fiber optics.
Cost and Scalability: Cable internet typically costs $50-120 monthly for high-speed service, while Starlink's residential plans start at $120 monthly for 20-100 Mbps speeds, with priority business plans beginning at $250 monthly.
The Complementary Future
Rather than replacing submarine cables, satellite constellations like Starlink are emerging as critical backup and supplementary infrastructure:
Rural and Remote Access: Starlink excels in providing connectivity to areas where submarine cables will never reach, such as remote islands, rural communities, and mobile platforms.
Emergency Backup: During cable outages like those in the Red Sea or Baltic Sea, satellite internet can provide essential backup connectivity, though at reduced capacity.
Geographic Redundancy: The combination of submarine cables and satellite networks creates a more resilient global internet infrastructure, reducing single points of failure.
The Bandwidth Bottleneck
The fundamental challenge remains bandwidth density. Submarine cables carry 99% of international data traffic because they can handle massive data volumes efficiently. A single fiber strand can carry multiple terabits of data, and cables contain dozens of fiber pairs. This creates capacity that satellite networks, constrained by spectrum limitations and inter-satellite distances, cannot currently match.
As one industry expert noted: "Laser connections between satellites in Low Earth Orbit can potentially supplement, but not completely eliminate, the need for submarine cables."
Conclusion: The Hidden Foundation of Our Digital World
The Red Sea cable cuts and Microsoft Azure disruptions serve as a stark reminder that our increasingly digital world rests on surprisingly fragile physical infrastructure. Sometimes described as the "world's information super-highways," undersea cables carry over 95 percent of international data and provide high capacity, cost-effective, and reliable connections that are critical for our daily lives.
As we become more dependent on cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and global digital services, the security and resilience of undersea cables becomes increasingly critical. The attacks in the Red Sea demonstrate how regional conflicts can have global digital consequences, affecting everything from business operations to personal communications.
The challenge ahead is clear: we must invest in redundancy, diversify routes, strengthen international cooperation, and develop rapid response capabilities to protect the invisible infrastructure that powers our connected world. The cost of inaction, as the Red Sea incidents show, is measured not just in technical disruptions but in economic losses, geopolitical vulnerabilities, and the digital isolation of entire regions.
Our global digital economy is only as strong as its weakest cable. The time to strengthen this critical infrastructure is now, before the next crisis strikes at the heart of our connected world.
