The Red Sea cable cuts expose the internet’s weak spot

Always-on internet connections have become as essential as running water, heat, and power. But a massive outage affecting Africa, Asia, and the Middle East in recent days underscores the fragility of the infrastructure that keeps us online. Some 15 subsea cables run through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait in the Red Sea, and four were reportedly severed, significantly disrupting internet traffic.

Hundreds of subsea cables lie on the sea floor, carrying nearly all global internet traffic (an estimated 99%). “We had cuts in the Red Sea last year, and now we’re in the same boat again, so to speak,” says Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Kentik. When capacity is lost, providers must reroute traffic to the remaining links, creating latency and reliability issues.

The continent-affecting