Red Sea cable outage: Internet disruptions, slower speeds in parts of Middle East, South Asia

A series of undersea cable outages in the Red Sea degraded internet connectivity in multiple countries including those in South Asia, on September 7.While NetBlocks, an entity that monitors global internet has named India as one of the countries impacted by the disruption, Indian telecom operators said they have not seen any impact yet on internet and data connectivity services, as their networks have redundancies and fall-backs supported by several undersea cables, across multiple routes.

The South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe 4 cable is operated by a consortium of telecom companies including Tata Communications.

There is no official word yet on the issue, and an email sent to Tata Communications did not elicit a response.Meanwhile, the cause of the outage at the vital nerve in global internet connectivity was not immediately known, though some reports did draw attention to concerns around Red Sea campaign by Yemen’s Houthi rebels.

NetBlocks in a post on X said: “Confirmed: A series of subsea cable outages in the Red Sea has degraded internet connectivity in multiple countries including #Pakistan and #India; the incident is attributed to failures affecting the SMW4 and IMEWE cable systems near Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.”Read more: France faces more turmoil with government on brink ahead of confidence vote

In a status update, Microsoft warned Azure users of increased network latency on traffic routes through the Middle East.

“Starting at 05:45 UTC on 06 September 2025, network traffic traversing through the Middle East may experience increased latency due to undersea fiber cuts in the Red Sea. Network traffic is not interrupted as Microsoft has rerouted traffic through alternate network paths,” it said.

The Microsoft update further informed users: “We do expect higher latency on some traffic that previously traversed through the Middle East”.

Network traffic that does not traverse through the Middle East is not impacted, it said promising regular updates if conditions change.

Undersea cable outages disrupt global connectivity by severing data flows across vital digital routes, and repair and restoration can be complex and tricky. Typically, undersea cable cuts are a result of accidental ship anchors, natural disasters, sabotage or conflicts.