Undersea cable outages in Red Sea disrupt global internet; India says no major impact yet

A series of undersea cable outages in the Red Sea on September 7 disrupted internet connectivity in several countries, including parts of South Asia, according to internet watchdog NetBlocks.

In a post on X, NetBlocks confirmed that disruptions were linked to failures affecting the South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe 4 (SMW4) and IMEWE cable systems near Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. It said the outages degraded connectivity in countries including Pakistan and India.

However, Indian telecom operators maintained that they have not observed any major impact, citing network redundancies and fallback routes supported by multiple undersea cables. “Our networks are resilient and designed to handle such disruptions,” one industry source said.

The SMW4 cable is operated by a consortium of telecom firms, including Tata Communications, though the company has yet to issue an official statement on the incident.

Microsoft issues latency warning

Tech giant Microsoft also flagged the issue, warning users of its Azure cloud platform of potential delays.
“Starting at 05:45 UTC on September 6, network traffic traversing through the Middle East may experience increased latency due to undersea fiber cuts in the Red Sea,” the company said in a status update. It added that while network traffic has been rerouted via alternate paths, some users may still see slower connections.

Cause remains unclear

The exact reason for the cable failures has not been confirmed, though reports have pointed to the ongoing Red Sea campaign by Yemen’s Houthi rebels as a possible factor. Historically, subsea cable outages have been caused by ship anchors, natural disasters, sabotage, or conflict zones.

Repairing such cables is a complex and lengthy process, as they lie on the seabed thousands of metres below surface and require specialized repair ships.

For now, while India’s connectivity remains largely stable, analysts caution that sustained outages in key Red Sea routes could ripple across global data flows, impacting both enterprises and consumers.

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