Telecoms and technology groups are forced to reroute internet traffic after attacks in the Red Sea made the region increasingly unstable, with damage to undersea cables putting connectivity and services around the world at risk.
Several companies said they took action after reports that submarine cables on the seabed had been severed by an anchor from the Rubimare ship, which was abandoned in February after Houthi rebels targeted and sank it.
Technology giant Microsoft said this week that “ongoing cable outages” in the Red Sea are affecting overall capacity on Africa's east coast, and that it is rerouting traffic flows as a result.
The Red Sea is a major route for sending Internet traffic between the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Europe via submarine cables, which transmit 99 percent of intercontinental data. TeleGeography, a consulting firm, estimates that more than $10 trillion worth of financial transactions are transmitted via these telegrams every day.
The Houthis' targeting of commercial ships in the region, which the group says supports the Palestinians, has recently increased amid the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. The Iranian-backed group first announced its killing in a raid in early March.
The US said an anchor pulled from the Rubimare ship as it sank was responsible for a recent submarine cable break in the Red Sea that disrupted global traffic.
Hong Kong-based HGC Global Communications, which provides global coverage, estimated that 25% of traffic had been affected after several submarine cables were cut, and said it had taken measures to reroute the affected traffic.
Seacom, which owns a number of submarine cables, said it also rerouted services last month, acknowledging that some customers had seen “an impact on their business across eastern and southern Africa”.
The company said last week that it was “optimistic” that cable repairs would be made during the second quarter, but was “aware of the ongoing disruptions in the region,” which it said could lead to unforeseen challenges.
Other leading telecom companies have played down concerns about the cuts. Orange, which uses but does not own the damaged cables in the Red Sea, said it would put in place additional security measures. But the French operator, along with AT&T and Tata Communications, told the Financial Times that they were able to reroute traffic in the event of problems.
Damage to and rerouting of cables as a result is not uncommon, executives and analysts say, citing the most common causes as dragging anchors and fishing vessel activity.
Such factors cause errors “every three days somewhere in the world on average,” said Alan Mauldin, research director at TeleGeography.
He said that operators have the ability to use many different cables, as the majority of countries are able to tolerate multiple cable outages.
“If two or three more cables go down, and if they are high capacity, that could have a more serious impact on connectivity for some network operators or countries,” Mauldin added.
Keri Gilder, CEO of digital infrastructure company Colt Technology Services, said the company had previously had to quickly migrate data from one cable to another due to damage caused by fishing boats.
“There can be an impact on the quality of service in terms of latency,” Gelder added, referring to delays in the time data is transferred from one place to another, which could affect, for example, video calls. “For us in business, it takes milliseconds.”
Colt did not have to reroute Red Sea traffic, but Gilder said the route was “very congested” and she was not surprised that the cables were cut because the route was relatively narrow and shallow.
The Houthis denied deliberately targeting submarine cables, while Yemeni officials said they were in daily contact with international submarine companies in the Red Sea and would provide support to repair any damage.
“The worst-case scenario is that all the cables are cut. That would be a very dangerous situation,” said Chris van Zineke Bergman, chief commercial officer at Unitirreno, an undersea partnership in Italy that is building a cable in the Mediterranean.
This will divert traffic over longer paths, affecting the quality of video traffic, financial transactions and cloud applications, he added. “If a trading company has a circuit on a cable that gets cut, that's a big problem for that particular company because it takes a long time to get a replacement connection up and running. Also, if you take a long route, it affects trading because you're adding latency to the connection.”
Markus Solarz-Hendrix, a research fellow at the Policy Exchange think tank, pointed to the 2006 earthquake that crippled international banking and trade in Hong Kong and South Korea.
While most network operators were able to reroute traffic, the incident caused connection speeds for internet users in Hong Kong to plummet, while Bloomberg terminals used by merchants across the city were down.
“The impact would be similarly severe if a cable accident in the Red Sea disrupted digital bandwidth sufficiently,” Solarz-Hendrix said.
Additional reporting by Alexandra Hill
