Red Sea cable cuts just knocked 40% of India offline and slowed half the cloud.
It was not hackers, not satellites falling silent, and not a solar storm. It was older and simpler than that: a set of undersea cables cut in the Red Sea, the most volatile shipping lane in the world. For decades, experts warned that global internet infrastructure was fragile. When the cuts happened, the warnings became fact. Connectivity collapsed across India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. The event revealed not a technical flaw but a failure of planning, coordination, and responsibility. The outage was not minor. It showed how the core of global communication still depends on unprotected cables lying on the seabed of contested waters, how billion-dollar cloud providers shuffle traffic through longer routes that strain their networks, and how the internet remains vulnerable to sabotage, neglect, or decay.
Microsoft described the incident with sterile language that made the damage sound temporary: “We do expect higher latency on some traffic that previously traversed through the Middle East. Network traffic that does not traverse through the Middle East is not impacted.” http://www.networkworld.com/article/4052813/red-sea-cable-cuts-trigger-latency-for-azure-cloud-services-across-asia-and-the-middle-east.html
The word “latency” masked the real story. Rerouted traffic flooded alternative paths, slowed financial exchanges, disrupted logistics, and broke the performance of cloud-native applications. TechInsights analyst Manish Rawat warned that e-commerce platforms, logistics providers, and software companies could see lost revenue and broken contracts as outages spread through their systems.
The cuts severed two of the most important cable systems near Jeddah: SMW4 and IMEWE. These are not obscure back-up lines. They are vital arteries linking Asia to Europe. NetBlocks confirmed that internet access in multiple countries collapsed, with India dropping to only 41 percent of normal capacity indianexpress.com/article/world/undersea-cables-cut-red-sea-disrupt-internet-asia-india-pakistan-10235011. That figure should have triggered emergency measures. Instead, the operators, Tata Communications and Alcatel-Lucent, remained silent. Their refusal to explain mirrored a larger culture of indifference in which the most important infrastructure is left vulnerable in one of the world’s most violent regions.
The timing cannot be separated from the conflict that surrounds it. Since late 2023, Houthi rebels have attacked over 100 ships in the Red Sea. They denied involvement in this incident, but they have previously dragged anchors that severed cables and launched strikes that damaged maritime infrastructure. In March 2024, a missile strike sank the Rubymar, cutting a quarter of regional internet capacity. The Red Sea is no longer a neutral corridor for shipping. It has become a digital chokepoint where each break is a geopolitical warning.
Repair is slow and costly. Specialized ships must locate the damage and restore the lines, a process that takes weeks in waters that remain hostile. Insurers raise premiums on every asset in the corridor. Companies absorb losses they cannot calculate, while governments look away. Greyhound Research’s Sanchit Vir Gogia said it clearly: “The cost of repair is steep and slow: millions of dollars and weeks of downtime for each cable. Hidden costs pile up as well. Insurers raise premiums on infrastructure in conflict-prone waters. Regulators question the adequacy of resilience planning.”
http://www.networkworld.com/article/4052813/red-sea-cable-cuts-trigger-latency-for-azure-cloud-services-across-asia-and-the-middle-east.html