What do we know about internet disruptions from cut subsea cables in the Red Sea

Undersea cable cuts in the Red Sea disrupted internet access in parts of Asia and the Middle East, experts said on Sunday, though it wasn't immediately clear what caused the incident.

Undersea cables are one of the backbones of the internet, along with satellite connections and land-based cables. Typically, internet service providers have multiple access points and reroute traffic if one fails, though it can slow down access for users.

There has been concern about the cables being targeted in a Red Sea campaign by Yemen's Houthi rebels, which the rebels describe as an effort to pressure Israel to end its war on Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

The Houthis have denied attacking the lines in the past.

The International Cable Protection Committee says there is approximately 1.7 million kilometres of undersea cables and they go through between 150 and 200 incidents a year.

Up to 80 per cent of these issues are caused by accidental human activities such as fishing and ship anchors, and the rest are attributed to natural hazards.

What do we know about the faulty cables?

Cybersecurity organisation NetBlocks said on social media platform Mastodon that “a series of subsea cable outages in the Red Sea has degraded internet connectivity in multiple countries,” which it said included India and Pakistan.

It blamed “failures affecting the [South East Asia, Middle East ,Western Europe ] (SMW4) and [India-Middle East-Western Europe] (IMEWE) cable systems near Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.”

The SMW4 cable is a 18,800 kilometre subsea cable that connects Marseille, France and Palermo, Italy to various countries in Asia and North Africa, including Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Tunisia and Algeria.

It's been in place since 2005 and cost $500 million (€426.40 million), which was jointly invested by France's Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN) and Japan's information company Fujitsu.

The IMEWE cable is $480 million (€409.35 million) project that is approximately 12,091 kilometres long that links France and Italy to India through the Middle East.

Euronews Next reached out to French and Italian telecommunications companies to see whether there are any relevant outages on their networks but did not receive an immediate reply.

Saudi Arabia did not acknowledge the disruption and authorities there did not respond to a request for comment.

In Kuwait, authorities also said the FALCON GCX cable running through the Red Sea had been cut, causing disruptions in the small, oil-rich nation. GCX did not respond to a request for comment.

In the United Arab Emirates, home to Dubai and Abu Dhabi, internet users on the country's state-owned Du and Etisalat networks complained of slower internet speeds. The government did not acknowledge the disruption.