The internet isn't magic - it's a bunch of cables on the ocean floor that some drunk ship captain just fucked up spectacularly. Around September 6-7, multiple undersea fiber-optic cables in the Red Sea were severed, likely by a commercial vessel dragging its anchor across the seabed like it was mowing a goddamn lawn.
The damage is real and massive. At least 10 countries are dealing with degraded internet connectivity, from India's 1.4 billion people down to Kuwait's oil industry. Network monitoring groups like NetBlocks confirmed that "multiple countries including India and Pakistan have been affected" by what they're calling "subsea cable outages" near the Saudi coast. Yahoo News reported that the outage affected roughly 25% of internet traffic between Asia and Europe.
This isn't sabotage - it's stupidity. Before you start blaming Iranian speedboats or Chinese submarines, industry experts are pointing to commercial shipping accidents. The International Cable Protection Committee's John Wrottesley told AP News that "early independent analysis indicates that the probable cause of damage is commercial shipping activity in the region." Translation: some cargo ship captain probably dropped anchor without checking if he was about to slice through the digital backbone of three continents.
The Red Sea is a nightmare for cables. The Bab el-Mandeb Strait is only 20 miles wide at its narrowest point, but 15 undersea cables are crammed through there like internet spaghetti. When you've got that many cables in one chokepoint and ships constantly dropping anchors, it's not a matter of if - it's when. About 30% of all cable cuts globally are caused by ships' anchors or fishing nets, according to industry data from the Submarine Cable Network.
Microsoft immediately sent out Azure incident alerts warning customers about latency spikes after "multiple undersea fiber cuts in the Red Sea" forced traffic onto backup routes through Europe. If you're running cloud services that depend on sub-100ms connections to Asia or the Middle East, you're now dealing with 400-500ms response times. My API calls to Mumbai went from 80ms to 450ms overnight - might as well be sending carrier pigeons. Tom's Hardware reported that Microsoft had to reroute Azure traffic on Saturday after the cuts.
The repair timeline is measured in weeks, not hours. You can't just slap some electrical tape on a fiber-optic cable that's sitting 2 miles underwater. Specialized cable repair ships have to locate each break, haul the cable up from the ocean floor, splice it back together, and lower it down again. Even with multiple repair vessels working around the clock, we're looking at potentially a month before full capacity is restored, according to cable repair industry standards.
This whole clusterfuck is a perfect reminder of how fragile our digital infrastructure really is. We trust the internet to "just work," but it's actually held together by a few dozen cables lying on the bottom of the ocean, apparently protected by nothing more than the good judgment of whatever ship captain happens to be passing by.
Millions of people from Mumbai to Dubai now have garbage internet because some ship captain had one job and fucked it up. That's 2025 - our entire digital economy runs on cables sitting on the ocean floor, protected by the maritime equivalent of "please don't step on the grass" signs. One drunk captain dropping anchor in the wrong spot can take down more infrastructure than most hackers dream of touching.