The Media Line: Red Sea Cable Cut Slows Internet From Pakistan to Gulf

Audio By Carbonatix

Enlarge

Red Sea Cable Cut Slows Internet From Pakistan to Gulf 

By Arshad Mehmood/The Media Line 

An undersea fiber-optic cable cut in the Red Sea disrupted internet service over the weekend across Pakistan and parts of South and West Asia, throttling connections that link Asia to Europe through Egypt’s Suez corridor. Network monitors and telecom firms said the incident occurred near Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and affected two of the region’s main arteries—South East Asia–Middle East–Western Europe 4 (SEA-ME-WE 4) and India–Middle East–Western Europe (I-ME-WE)—forcing providers to reroute traffic and warning of slowdowns during peak hours as repairs get underway. 

Pakistan Telecommunication Company Ltd. confirmed a nationwide impact, while users in the United Arab Emirates reported intermittent access on Etisalat and Du as engineers shifted traffic to alternate paths. NetBlocks, the internet observatory, reported degraded connectivity in Pakistan and India tied to failures near the Red Sea landings by Jeddah. Microsoft said on its status page that customers in the Middle East could face delays from “cable cuts,” adding that traffic not transiting the region continues to operate normally. Operators have not given a timetable, and industry sources caution that undersea repairs often take weeks because they require specialized ships, permits, and favorable weather. 

The incident strikes one of the world’s most crowded subsea corridors. More than 550 active cables now span about 1.4 million kilometers globally, and undersea systems carry well over 90% of intercontinental data. The Red Sea route is particularly dense because it provides the shortest path between Europe and Asia through the Suez landing stations, making disruptions there ripple across multiple countries at once. 

Tata Communications is the landing party and segment operator for portions of SEA-ME-WE 4, while I-ME-WE is run by a multinational consortium with Alcatel-Lucent as system supplier; neither had issued detailed public statements at the time of reporting. Telecom engineers say carriers design networks with backup capacity across parallel cables and terrestrial links, yet latency and congestion still climb when a major trunk goes dark. 

Security concerns in the waterway have grown since late 2023, when Yemen’s Houthi movement began targeting commercial vessels in what it called solidarity with Palestinians and an effort to pressure Israel. While the group has denied striking subsea cables, the campaign has focused attention on the vulnerability of maritime infrastructure that lies unseen on the seabed but underpins everything from cloud services to video calls and financial transactions. 

With repair ships expected to mobilize and traffic shifting across alternate routes, users in Pakistan, India, and the Gulf states should expect slower speeds and patchy performance until fiber pairs are located, lifted, and spliced back into service.