Undersea and land cables carry communications signals, such as Internet traffic, across oceans and over land – and are often heavily insulated to prevent damage.
However, with enough determination and a little ingenuity, even cables in the deepest waters can be damaged, whether intentionally or unintentionally.
Cloudflare’s latest Internet Disruption Report identifies damage to underwater cables as the leading cause of Internet outages in Q1 2024.
Restrictions, disruptions and unrest
The most significant deliberate disruption of internet traffic was caused by Houthi rebels operating in the Red Sea, who cut three cables in the region and disrupted international shipping during a campaign of missile and drone strikes against traffic sailing on the Suez Canal. The Europe India Gateway, Seacom/Tata and Asia Africa Europe-1 cables all showed signs of intentional damage, likely caused by a ship’s anchor, the report said.
-Cables surrounding the African coastline have been particularly vulnerable to underwater rockfall, the West Africa cable system, the Submarine Atlantic 3/West Africa submarine cable, the African coast to With both Europe and MainOne having suffered damage in this way.
Elections, periods of civil unrest, or a combination of the two have also contributed to outages in some parts of the world, usually caused by suppression of protests and control of the flow of information, Chad, Pakistan and Senegal all exhibiting fluctuations and breakdowns in regular traffic. .
War is obviously another contributing factor to regions experiencing internet outages, with Ukraine, Sudan and Palestine all experiencing impacts to their connectivity, with disruption in Ukraine largely caused by drone strikes and Russian missiles on Ukrainian energy production infrastructure.
