A break ~1,450km from Zafarana, Egypt, hits Asia-Europe-Africa traffic; a global cable-ship shortage stretches the fix and re-routes capacity
The narrow Red Sea passage carries 17 percent of global internet traffic on 17-plus cable systems, making it the world's most strategically exposed internet chokepoint.
The fiber-optic cables on the world's seabeds carry over 99% of international internet traffic, and concentrated chokepoints in the Red Sea, Hormuz, and Taiwan Strait face rising deliberate disruption.
Taiwan's 14 international submarine cables carry nearly all external internet traffic for the island, making them a primary gray-zone pressure point in any Taiwan Strait contingency.
A five-day T-Mobile Fiber outage in the US Southeast and brief but global backbone disruptions at Arelion, Comcast and AT&T mark a noisy month for the internet's core
The Aletar subsea cable between Tartous and Alexandria was severed on June 15; Syria rerouted via Cyprus and Turkey before splicing it back
Emboldened by its wartime shipping blockade, Tehran signals it could charge tech firms tolls, or disrupt traffic, on cables that feed the Gulf's AI boom
Cable No. 3 broke ~2.64km off Dongyin in April 2026; Chunghwa Telecom switched 1,500 residents to microwave links as a court jailed a Chinese captain over an earlier cut