No One Is Coming to Fix the Subsea Cables

March 18, 2026

Subsea internet cables carry 99 percent of transoceanic digital traffic.¹ Financial transactions, diplomatic communications, military data, and the mundane browsing of billions of people all travel through fiber-optic strands resting on the ocean floor. These cables require something that is in desperately short supply: international cooperation.

They need it for route surveys, installation permits, maintenance windows, and emergency repairs across dozens of jurisdictions. They need it when a cable is severed in waters controlled by a hostile government or a non-state militia. They need it when the only repair ship in the region cannot enter a conflict zone without a ceasefire that no one is willing to broker. The world is fracturing, and the infrastructure that holds the global internet together is fracturing with it.

The Red Sea was, until recently, the highway of the global internet. Roughly 95 percent of data traffic between Asia and Europe transited its waters.² The geography was compelling: shorter routes, lower latency, international waters with fewer regulatory obstacles. Egypt sat at the junction, drawing an estimated 10 percent of its national telecoms revenue from transit fees alone.²

Then the Houthis started firing. Since late 2023, two major outage events have each severed four subsea cables simultaneously.² The first major outage in February 2024 took nearly six months to fix because no one could secure safe passage for repair vessels into Houthi-controlled waters.³ As subsea cable consultant Roderick Beck put it, “the outages in themselves are not the problem. The problem is the inability to repair them in any reasonable length of time.”²

The industry had barely begun to digest the Red Sea’s transformation from a commercial thoroughfare into a no-go zone when a second choke point closed. The U.S. led military campaign against Iran in early 2026 turned the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf into an active war zone.⁴ As Mr. Beck has noted, many subsea cable consortiums had viewed the Persian Gulf as their best hope for a Red Sea bypass route, only to discover that the Gulf is now possibly worse than the Red Sea.⁵ Alcatel Submarine Networks, the French state-owned company contracted to lay cable for Meta’s 2Africa Pearls extension, issued force majeure notices and halted all construction.⁶ The cable-laying vessel Ile De Batz sits stranded off the coast of Dammam, Saudi Arabia, unable to complete its mission.⁴ A significant portion of the 2Africa Pearls cable has already been laid on the seabed but remains unconnected to its landing stations.⁴

The cascade extends well beyond 2Africa. SEA-ME-WE 6, originally scheduled for service in 2024 and already delayed to June 2027, faces further uncertainty.⁴ The cable’s bypass route runs up the Persian Gulf to Bahrain, then traverses the desert to a cable landing station in Jeddah before connecting to the Red Sea corridor through Egypt, meaning it depends on both choke points remaining functional.⁵ The $700 million WorldLink Transit Cable Project, whose entire premise rested on positioning the Persian Gulf as a viable alternative corridor for Asia-Europe traffic, appears likely to die on the vine.⁴ The Fibre in Gulf project connecting the GCC countries and Iraq has been thrown into limbo.⁴

Both the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea are now effectively closed to commercial cable repair vessels.⁴ Any cables damaged by missiles, naval mines, or the anchors of stricken ships will remain severed for the duration of the conflict.⁴ Multiple active cable systems serving billions of users are already living this reality.

The closure of two maritime choke points simultaneously has triggered a frantic search for overland alternatives. Gulf states are financing competing data corridors through Syria, Iraq, and East Africa to bypass the routes that their digital connectivity depends on.⁷

The most advanced project is SilkLink: Saudi Arabia’s STC Group signed an $800 million contract in February 2026 to build 4,500 kilometers of fiber across Syria to a submarine cable landing station at Tartus on the Mediterranean.⁷ This replaced an earlier plan to route through Israel, which collapsed after the Gaza war.⁷ Qatar’s Ooredoo is building a second corridor through Iraq with a separate $500 million commitment to overland routes from Iraq through Turkey to Europe.⁷ A third project, WorldLink, announced by a privately funded consortium, would run a $700 million hybrid cable from the UAE through Iraq to Turkey, though it has no named construction contractor and a five-year timeline.⁷

All three front-runner corridors converge on Turkey as the gateway to Europe.⁷ This consolidation is inherently problematic. Additionally, the corridors being planned as escape routes from geographic vulnerability would themselves pass through Syria, Iraq, Sudan, and Ethiopia, countries where conflict or institutional fragility has severed infrastructure before.⁷

For India, the timing is particularly damaging. Research by the Observer Research Foundation indicates approximately a third of India’s westbound internet traffic travels through cables passing near the Strait of Hormuz.⁸ India’s international internet traffic exits primarily through two gateways: Mumbai on the west coast and Chennai on the east, with Mumbai’s traffic largely dependent on cable systems crossing the Arabian Sea and the Gulf region.⁸ Cybersecurity experts warn that if multiple cables fail simultaneously, remaining routes would become overloaded, with serious latency and speed degradation materializing in as little as a week.⁸

Lynn Kuok, writing in Foreign Affairs, makes an intellectually thorough case for a comprehensive global architecture to secure subsea cables.¹ She argues for strengthening UNCLOS provisions, creating an intergovernmental organization for seabed infrastructure security, establishing a “trusted cable” certification program, and convening an ad hoc international conference to develop shared standards.¹ She acknowledges that a UN General Assembly resolution on these matters is “unlikely given the current geopolitical environment” but proposes that a “coalition of like-minded states” could convene an alternative forum.¹

Kuok’s diagnosis is correct, but is pragmatically flawed. The international order that would make such cooperation possible is in active disassembly. An analysis from Brookings describes the current moment with unusual directness: the post-World War II order, built to prevent the recurrence of catastrophic conflict through free trade, multilateral institutions, and alliance systems, is being deliberately undermined by its principal architect.⁹ The Trump administration has threatened NATO partner annexation, supported far-right European movements, implemented whimsical tariffs, and withdrawn from institutions the United States spent decades building.⁹ American foreign aid has been liquidated, democracy promotion eliminated, and conduct on the world stage has corroded the soft power that once made American leadership credible.⁹

This matters for subsea internet cables because the kind of cooperation Kuok envisions requires exactly what is evaporating: confidence in American intentions, institutional durability, and consistent rule application.⁹ As trust erodes, governments hedge. Partners diversify connections, alternative arrangements expand, and the habits of cooperation fade.⁹ Fragmentation becomes self-reinforcing.⁹

Kuok herself identifies the central problem. Global cabling is already splintering into U.S.-led, Chinese-led, and nonaligned blocs, with routes and landings increasingly mirroring geopolitical alignment rather than commercial logic.¹ She notes that U.S.-linked cable systems like Apricot and Echo were originally designed to cross the South China Sea but were reengineered to avoid it due to permitting delays and security concerns in China’s claimed maritime areas.¹ Some companies are rerouting cables around disputed areas rather than contesting China’s claims.¹

The legal framework is equally fractured. UNCLOS provisions governing subsea cables were drafted for an earlier era and build on the 1884 Convention for the Protection of Submarine Telegraph Cables, a treaty signed by legacy monarchs.¹ China ratified UNCLOS in 1996 but maintains domestic regulations that directly contradict it by requiring foreign companies to secure consent for cable routes across its continental shelf.¹ A Finnish court dismissed sabotage charges against the crew of the Eagle S, a Russian-linked tanker suspected of severing five Baltic cables, on jurisdictional grounds because the incident occurred beyond Finland’s territorial waters, and the vessel’s flag state, the Cook Islands, has initiated no proceedings.¹

The United States is not even a party to UNCLOS. Proposing that Washington lead a new subsea order while simultaneously dismantling the broader international architecture is, at best, aspirational. At worst, it is a distraction from actions that could actually be taken now.

The more pragmatic approach is already being demonstrated in Europe. The European Union has adopted an action plan with measures to prevent, deter, detect, and respond to acts against subsea cables, as well as to repair damage.¹ NATO has established a coordination cell and a maritime center dedicated to undersea infrastructure security, increased air and naval patrols in the North and Baltic Seas, and launched initiatives to detect cable damage and reroute data via satellites.¹ The EU promotes the deployment of Science Monitoring and Reliable Telecommunications (SMART) technology, which equips data cables with environmental and security sensors.¹ The regional scope is precisely why it might work.

I wrote about SMART cable sensors in 2024 when covering Madeira’s submarine cable infrastructure. The Anel CAM project, connecting mainland Portugal with the Azores and Madeira, incorporates approximately 50 SMART repeaters across its 3,812-kilometer span. These sensors, placed roughly every 50 kilometers, can detect seafloor motion, water pressure changes, and temperature variations without interfering with the cable’s primary communication function. The dual-use value is significant: the same sensors that provide tsunami early warnings also detect suspicious activity along the seabed.

When the Baltic Sea cables were severed in November 2024, I argued that the response should be the same regardless of whether it was sabotage. The need to fortify protection for submarine cables exists independently of attribution. Increased redundancy through geographic path diversity, expanded deployment of SMART sensors, enhanced physical security at cable landing stations, and a stronger state posture around critical infrastructure: these are measures that any state or collection of states can implement without waiting for a global treaty that will never arrive.

The European model works because it operates within an existing alliance structure with shared threat perception and the institutional capacity to act. NATO patrols the North and Baltic Seas not because an international treaty requires it but because member states recognize a common vulnerability and have the military assets to address it. The EU promotes SMART cable deployment not through a global certification regime but through its own regulatory framework and investment incentives.

States outside Europe can adopt the same approach. The Gulf states are already doing so out of necessity, even if their competing overland corridors reflect what Kristian Ulrichsen called “an element of competition for influence rather than an alignment of effort.”⁷ India, with a third of its westbound internet traffic exposed to the Hormuz choke point, has every reason to invest in redundant paths through the Bay of Bengal and overland connections that bypass the Middle East entirely.⁸ The Polar Connect initiative, an Arctic submarine cable system linking Europe, North America, and East Asia designated as a Cable Project of European Interest by the EU, represents another form of regional diversification designed to circumvent vulnerable maritime corridors.⁴

The unfortunate consequence of all this is something Kuok describes with precision: subsea cable routes are following political paths rather than commercial ones.¹ Meta’s Project Waterworth, a new 50,000-kilometer cable, was designed explicitly to bypass the Middle East.⁴ Saudi Arabia’s SilkLink routes through Syria because routing through Israel became politically impossible after the Gaza war.⁷ U.S.-linked cable systems avoid the South China Sea because engaging with China’s permitting requirements carries both delays and strategic risk.¹

Each of these decisions makes commercial and security sense in isolation. Collectively, they accelerate the fracturing of what was once a unified global network into geopolitically segmented blocs. States maintain connections to allies and diminish connectivity to adversaries. Redundancy follows alliance lines. The physical infrastructure of the internet increasingly mirrors the political map rather than the technical or commercial one.

A 100-gigabit wavelength from Singapore to Marseille via the Red Sea used to cost six times less than routing through Iran or Iraq and up through Turkey.² That price differential existed because the global system rewarded the most direct geographic path. As political considerations override commercial logic, costs rise, latency increases, and the economic advantages that drove the internet’s expansion erode.

This is not an outcome anyone should welcome. But it is the outcome that current geopolitics are producing. The world’s subsea cable infrastructure was built on an assumption of baseline international cooperation: that repair ships could access the cables they were repairing, that permitting processes would follow predictable rules, that flag states would hold vessels accountable for cable damage, and that the major powers shared an interest in keeping the digital commons functional. Every one of those assumptions is now contested.

Waiting for a global architecture that the current political environment cannot sustain is a losing strategy. Regional resilience offers the only viable path: broader geographic redundancy, more SMART cable sensors, stronger military patrols around critical infrastructure, and the institutional capacity to act without depending on adversaries to cooperate. The cables will still connect the world. They will just follow different paths, and those paths will tell you more about who trusts whom than about where the data needs to go.

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