Experts Say Commercial Ship Likely Cut Red Sea Subsea Cables, Disrupting Internet Across Three Regions

A commercial vessel likely dragged an anchor across multiple submarine cables in the Red Sea, severing links that disrupted internet service for users across parts of Africa, Asia and the Middle East, experts said Tuesday.

The International Cable Protection Committee said 15 submarine cables transit the narrow Bab el‑Mandeb Strait at the southern mouth of the Red Sea, where the cuts appear to have occurred. Initial reporting identified damage to the South East Asia–Middle East–Western Europe 4 (SEA‑ME‑WE 4), the India‑Middle East‑Western Europe (IMEWE) and the FALCON GCX cables; analysis by internet monitoring firm Kentik later added the Europe India Gateway (EIG) cable to the list of affected systems.

"Early independent analysis indicates that the probable cause of damage is commercial shipping activity in the region," John Wrottesley, operations manager for the International Cable Protection Committee, told The Associated Press. Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Kentik, said the working assumption is that a commercial vessel dropped anchor and dragged it across the four cables, severing the connections.

Madory cautioned that no country was completely offline but said providers had lost subsets of their international transit. "Nobody's completely offline, but each provider has lost a subset of their international transit," he said. "So if you imagine this is like an equivalent to plumbing and you lose some volume of water coming down the pipes ... and now you just have less volumes to carry the traffic."

Authorities in some countries initially reported the cut happened off the coast of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; Saudi officials and the companies that manage the cables have not publicly confirmed that location. The committee noted that cabling in parts of the Red Sea lies at relatively shallow depths, increasing vulnerability to anchor drags and other surface‑level maritime activity.

Wrottesley said damage to submarine cables from dragged anchors accounts for roughly 30 percent of incidents each year, "representing around 60 faults," underscoring the routine risk that surface shipping poses to undersea infrastructure.

The outage appeared to affect at least 10 nations in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, with internet providers in India, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates among those reporting degraded international service. Providers typically route traffic through alternate cables or satellite links when a segment is damaged, but rerouting can increase latency and reduce available capacity for some routes.

Undersea cables carry the bulk of international internet traffic, and operators dispatch specialized repair ships to locate, retrieve and splice damaged fiber when outages occur. Cable managers and national authorities customarily investigate causes and coordinate repairs, though those steps can take days to weeks depending on weather, ship availability and the depth and location of damage.

The Red Sea region has been a focus of heightened concern since last year, when multiple undersea cables were cut and international attention turned to maritime security. In early 2024, Yemen’s internationally recognized government in exile alleged that Houthi rebels planned attacks on undersea cables; several cables were later cut and some analysts suggested anchor drags by ships that had been attacked might have caused damage. The Houthi movement denied responsibility for those incidents.

Cable operators, maritime authorities and independent internet analysts said investigations were ongoing. Restoring full capacity to affected routes will depend on the results of those investigations and the scheduling and progress of repair operations by cable maintenance vessels.