Subsea Cable Damage Near Jeddah Causes Internet Slowdowns Across Middle East, South Asia and Africa

Two critical subsea cables were damaged off the coast of Jeddah on Saturday, disrupting internet connectivity across the Middle East, South Asia, and parts of Africa in the latest reminder of the fragility of the global data network.

Global internet observatory NetBlocks confirmed outages on the SEA-ME-WE 4 (SMW4) and IMEWE cable systems, which serve as major data arteries between Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. The failures forced telecom operators to reroute traffic through alternative pathways, triggering widespread slowdowns and intermittent service failures.

In the United Arab Emirates, customers of Etisalat by e& and du reported difficulty streaming video, loading websites, and accessing messaging applications. Outage tracker Downdetector saw a spike in complaints at around 9 p.m. local time. Similar issues were recorded in other regional markets.

Cloudflare Radar, which monitors global internet routing, reported traffic shifts during the disruption, while Microsoft issued a warning to its Azure cloud clients that latency could increase for data flows transiting the Middle East. “Undersea fibre cuts can take time to repair; as such, we will continuously monitor, rebalance, and optimise routing to reduce customer impact,” the company said in a statement.

A Critical Corridor

The Red Sea is one of the world’s most important internet chokepoints, carrying an estimated 17 percent of global data traffic, according to research firm TeleGeography. A dense network of fibre-optic cables runs through the Red Sea, Arabian Gulf, and Arabian Sea, with key landing stations in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Oman, the UAE, and Djibouti. Even minor damage can have far-reaching consequences for services ranging from cloud applications and financial systems to airline reservations.

The incident comes just over a year after three subsea cables in the Red Sea were damaged when a vessel disabled by a Houthi attack drifted and dropped anchor, causing weeks of degraded connectivity. Analysts note that the combination of shallow waters, heavy shipping lanes, and regional security tensions makes the area particularly vulnerable to both accidental and deliberate damage.

Regional Impact

Pakistan Telecommunications Company Ltd confirmed a drop in capacity, adding that it had secured alternative bandwidth to reduce disruption for users. Authorities in Kuwait also reported connectivity issues, noting that the FALCON GCX cable had sustained damage.

Repairing subsea cables is a costly and complex process that can take weeks, depending on weather and access to specialised ships and crews. The International Cable Protection Committee estimates each incident can cost between $1 million and $3 million.

While telecom operators have built redundancy into their networks to mitigate the impact of such disruptions, Saturday’s outages highlight the risks facing global connectivity as more of the world’s critical services depend on seamless, high-speed links across the Red Sea corridor.