Telecoms and technology groups are being forced to reroute internet traffic after attacks in the Red Sea left the area increasingly unstable, with damage to undersea cables putting connectivity and services at risk around the world.
Several companies said they took action after reports that underwater cables on the seabed had been severed by an anchor from the Rubymar vessel, which was abandoned in February after being targeted and sunk by Houthi rebels.
Tech giant Microsoft said this week that “ongoing cable cuts” in the Red Sea are affecting overall capacity on Africa’s east coast and are rerouting traffic flows as a result.
The Red Sea is a key route for sending Internet traffic between the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Europe via undersea cables, which carry 99% of intercontinental data. TeleGeography, a consultancy, estimates that more than $10 trillion worth of financial transactions are transmitted over these cables every day.
Houthi attacks on commercial ships in the region, which the group says support the Palestinians in the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, have recently intensified. The Iran-backed group claimed its first casualties in a strike in early March.
The United States said an anchor dragged by the Rubymar as it sank was responsible for recent undersea cable cuts in the Red Sea that disrupted global traffic.
Hong Kong-based HGC Global Communications, which provides global coverage, estimated that 25% of traffic was affected by the cutting of several undersea cables and said it had taken steps to reroute affected traffic.
Seacom, which owns a number of undersea cables, said it had also rerouted services last month, acknowledging that some customers had experienced “an impact on their businesses in eastern and southern Africa”.
The company said last week that it was “optimistic” that cable repairs would take place during the second quarter, but that it was “aware of the ongoing unrest in the region,” which it said could introduce unanticipated challenges.
Other major telecom companies have downplayed concerns about cuts. Orange, which uses but does not own the damaged cables in the Red Sea, said it was putting additional safety measures in place. But the French operator, together with AT&T and Tata Communications, told the Financial Times they were able to reroute traffic in the event of problems.
Damage to cables and subsequent rerouting are not uncommon, executives and analysts say, with the most common causes cited being anchor dragging and fishing vessel activity.
Alan Mauldin, research director at TeleGeography, said such factors caused failures “on average every three days somewhere in the world”.
Operators have capacity on many different cables, with most countries able to withstand multiple cable outages, he said.
“If two or three more cables were to be eliminated, and if they were high-capacity, this could have a more severe impact on connectivity for some network operators or countries,” Mauldin added.
Keri Gilder, chief executive of digital infrastructure firm Colt Technology Services, said the company had previously had to quickly migrate data from one cable to another due to damage caused by fishing vessels.
“Latency can impact quality of service,” Gilder added, referring to the delay in transferring data from one location to another, which could, for example, affect video calls. “For us in business it’s milliseconds.”
Colt did not have to reroute traffic into the Red Sea, but Gilder said the route was “very congested” and she was not surprised that the cables had been cut because the route was relatively narrow and shallow.
The Houthis have denied deliberately targeting the undersea cables, while Yemeni officials have said they are in daily contact with international submarine companies in the Red Sea and will provide support to repair any damage.
Chris van Zinnicq Bergmann, commercial director of Unitirreno, a submarine partnership in Italy that is building a cable in the Mediterranean, said: “the worst-case scenario is that all the cables are cut. It would be a very serious situation.”
This would result in traffic being diverted over longer routes, affecting the quality of video traffic, financial exchanges and cloud applications, he added. “If a commercial company has a circuit on a wire that gets cut, that’s a big problem for that particular company because it takes time to get an alternative connection up and running. Also, if you take a long route, it will impact trading because it adds latency to the connection.”
Marcus Solarz Hendriks, a researcher at the think tank Policy Exchange, pointed out that a 2006 earthquake hampered international banking services and trade in Hong Kong and South Korea.
Although most network operators managed to reroute traffic, the incident caused slow connection speeds for Internet users in Hong Kong, while Bloomberg terminals used by traders were down across the city.
“The impact would be equally severe if a cable accident over the Red Sea were to sufficiently disrupt digital bandwidth,” Solarz Hendriks said.
Additional reporting by Alexandra Heal