DUBAI/ NEW DELHI/ISLAMABAD: Internet connectivity across several countries in Asia and the Middle East, including India, Pakistan, and the United Arab Emirates, has been severely affected after multiple subsea fiber-optic cables in the Red Sea were damaged, according to internet monitoring group NetBlocks.
The disruptions, which began late Friday, are linked to at least four major undersea cables running through the Red Sea, one of the world’s most critical digital arteries carrying an estimated 17% of global internet traffic. The affected systems include key international consortium cables that connect Europe to Asia via the Middle East.
Microsoft said on Saturday that its Azure cloud customers may experience increased latency and rerouting-related slowdowns, particularly on traffic previously routed through the Middle East. While core services remain operational, users in South Asia and parts of the Gulf reported noticeable slowdowns. “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,” Microsoft confirmed in a status update.
In the UAE, users of Etisalat and Du faced intermittent connectivity issues, while in India and Pakistan, telecom operators reported degraded speeds for international browsing and enterprise services. The outages have raised concerns for financial institutions, e-commerce platforms, and critical cloud-reliant services in the region.
Analysts noted that disruptions in this corridor are especially sensitive because more than 30 subsea cables run through the Suez Canal–Red Sea route, making it one of the world’s most congested chokepoints for digital infrastructure. By comparison, less than a dozen cables cross the Pacific Ocean at its busiest points.
According to global telecom data, subsea cables carry over 95% of international data traffic, with satellites accounting for only a fraction of capacity. This makes fiber cuts—whether accidental or deliberate, a major risk for the digital economy.
The current outages follow a pattern of recurring disruptions in the Red Sea region in recent years. In February 2024, damage to three undersea cables caused outages in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and parts of East Africa. Geopolitical instability, shipping activity, and undersea seismic activity have all been cited as potential threats to cable integrity.
NetBlocks warned that unless full repairs are undertaken quickly, affected countries could continue to face degraded connectivity for weeks. Repair operations are often logistically complex in the Red Sea due to security risks and heavy shipping traffic, industry experts said.
For now, major service providers are rerouting data via longer paths, including through Europe-Atlantic-Pacific routes, which has eased total outages but at the cost of higher latency and slower connections.
As digital dependency deepens across Asia and Africa, the incident underscores the fragility of global internet infrastructure concentrated along a handful of undersea chokepoints.
– WNN Desk
