When two major undersea communication cables were severed in the Red Sea in early September 2025, service degraded across a broad swath from Saudi Arabia to India. Voice over IP (WhatsApp, Zoom, Teams), email, social networks, cloud services, and enterprise software all slowed, delaying transactions and traffic between global headquarters, subsidiaries, and data centers (e.g., Microsoft, Google, Amazon Web Services). My near-instant connection in Abu Dhabi dropped while I tried to speak with a colleague in Honolulu—13,600 km (about 8,500 miles) away—on Zoom. While a minor inconvenience, it illustrates how reliant we are on cables—thin as a garden hose, stretching some 1.7 million kilometers beneath the oceans, and carrying over 95 percent of global data.

The proximate cause was the Southeast Asia–Middle East–Western Europe 4 (SMW4) and India–Middle East–Western Europe (IMEWE) cables being severed near Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Repairs can take weeks: specialized vessels must reach the site, locate the breaks, lift the cable, splice, and test before full-service returns. Timelines are constrained because only about 60 repair ships operate worldwide. Satellite workarounds offer limited relief; even low-Earth-orbit constellations carry only a small fraction of international traffic.

While no group claimed responsibility, the incident coincided with heightened Red Sea tensions, including ongoing Houthi attacks on international shipping and related regional military responses. The Houthis denied responsibility for a similar cut in 2024 after the sinking of MV Rubymar. Taken with cable damage in the Baltic Sea in 2023–2024, these episodes underscore the vulnerability of undersea cables and suggest cable disruption as a plausible hybrid-warfare vector—over 95% of cable damage each year comes from accidental, manmade damage such as dragging anchors, or environmental damage such as earthquakes. The policy challenge is to bolster resilience without overreaction—to de-risk while preserving beneficial interdependence.

India’s exposure and chokepoints

The Red Sea cuts again highlighted India’s status as a frontline, highly vulnerable state. As India becomes a digital superpower, it relies on cables transiting the Red Sea and Arabian Sea to link its expanding digital economy to Europe, North America, East Asia, and beyond. The SMW4 and IMEWE cuts slowed traffic to and from India and exposed dependence on routes that pass via chokepoints.

Chokepoints are narrow bodies of water that cables must cross to reach wider seas. They include the Bab el-Mandeb Strait at the entrance to the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz at the entrance to the Persian Gulf. While many global chokepoints exist (e.g., the Istanbul Straits, Straits of Florida, Strait of Gibraltar), India and other Indian Ocean states obtain much of their connectivity via routes through and around the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, as well as the Strait of Malacca near Singapore.

India’s vulnerability both mirrors and surpasses most other Indian Ocean littoral states. Unlike Pakistan, Oman, or Tanzania, India’s large service economy depends on continuity in outsourcing, cloud computing, and fintech. Reliable, low-latency connectivity is fundamental to economic well-being, growth, employment—and national security—one reason India joined Japan, Australia, and the US in declaring the Quad Partnership for Cable Connectivity and Resilience in May 2023. In crises, New Delhi depends on assured communications across the armed forces, ministries, and the civilian leadership, as well as with partners such as Japan. Cable cuts can severely curtail that capacity—even short of war.

Cable sabotage is rarely straightforward

Emphasizing India’s susceptibility alone risks missing a larger point: sabotaging long, multi-landing cables rarely produces neat, targeted outcomes. Breaking the Red Sea’s SMW4—an 18,800-km system linking Marseille and Palermo to countries across Asia and North Africa—degraded connectivity not just for India but also for Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE, and others. Latency was reported across the Arabian Peninsula, though several governments did not publicly confirm degradation.

Deep-water cutting is technically challenging—if you wish to cut a cable, the easiest place to do it is at the landing sites where cables make landfall and connect to data centers and the terrestrial network that links to us. But cutting a cable at a landing station is also an attack on a state’s territory, which may lead to retaliation. Rather than imagining submarines with “scissors,” it is more useful to examine documented outages. “Two-party” effects occur mostly where routes are short, bilateral, or minimally redundant—such as between small island states (e.g., Tonga, Cook Islands) or within smaller seas like the Baltic and Black Seas. In November 2024, the cut to C-Lion1 (Finland–Germany) primarily affected those states; around the same time, the BCS East–West Interlink (Lithuania–Sweden) was also cut, with Lithuania harder hit because it supplied about a third of national bandwidth. By contrast, long, multi-landing trunk cables in the Red Sea propagate disruption far more widely; the early-2024 incident associated with the sinking of MV Rubymar reportedly cut three cables and led to outages from East Africa to Southeast Asia, including India.

Some may argue that non-state armed groups like the Houthis care less about outcomes than overall “shock and awe” effect.” But in general, adversaries in the international system try to degrade an opponent without self-harm or collateral damage to partners. Sabotaging lengthy, multi-landing cables that touch both sides almost guarantees spillovers—not just in one country but also in neighbors that share the route.

Avoiding fragmentation

The specter of cable sabotage is real, but the answer is not to harden into rival blocs or redraw maps so that “our” networks never touch “theirs.” Fragmentation erodes interdependence—the feature that historically discouraged deliberate attacks—and paradoxically raises incentives to target long, “their-only” routes.

A worrisome trend is the move toward a bifurcated ecosystem that avoids landfall in China (including Hong Kong, once a favored landing site). The Apricot cable—backed by a consortium including Google, Meta, and NTT—will span roughly 12,000 km to connect Japan, Taiwan, Guam, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Singapore, purposefully avoiding China. While concerns over Chinese control and surveillance are real, building a de facto bifurcated network may increase—not reduce—vulnerability. Fragmentation reduces shared exposure and can lower expected self-harm to an attacker, thereby raising the strategic appeal of sabotage.

Today, interdependence and extensive redundancy and routing arrangements make it difficult to impose clean, targeted costs on India, Japan, or the US without blowback. As networks bifurcate and reciprocal exposure declines, the cost–benefit calculus shifts. By the time Apricot is operational, sabotage along routes that largely bypass China could, in theory, impose costs on others while limiting blowback to China. Extend this 10–20 years and a more segmented map emerges; if bifurcation proceeds, cable sabotage becomes more plausible—and more tempting—as attackers exploit a fragmenting network. In short, fragmentation weakens deterrence by eroding mutual vulnerability.

Conclusion

The increase in cable cuts around Eurasia is worrying. They demonstrate the risks of heightened instability and the possible beginning of the end of our interconnected world. They also showcase the vulnerability of critical infrastructure like undersea cables as targets in hybrid warfare. India may become a frontline state as its economic growth and sovereignty increasingly rest on uninterrupted connectivity. But it doesn’t need to be this way. For nearly 80 years, undersea cables have not only been largely invisible to the public but remained secure. They are not more vulnerable all of a sudden. Rather, they were apolitical and embedded within a more cooperative, interdependent system. Despite rising tensions, states should avoid letting great-power rivalry from dismantle this foundation. If the undersea cable ecosystem that has served us so well becomes fragmented, the consequence will likely be more sabotage, not less.

PacNet commentaries and responses represent the views of the respective authors. Alternative viewpoints are always welcomed and encouraged.

Brendon J. Cannon ([email protected]) is an academic with expertise in international security, geopolitics, and the Indo-Pacific, with a particular focus on global power distributions, regional security dynamics, and the interplay between security and emerging technologies.

Photo Credit: Maritime Tales & Cutting Edge Sails