Damage to cables under the Red Sea highlights the broader threat of conflict in the Middle East

Mysterious damage to vital communications cables under the Red Sea has raised concerns about whether the conflict in the Middle East is now beginning to threaten the global internet.

Just as the waters off Yemen contain crucial shipping lanes, they are also a crucial location for undersea cables that carry email and other digital traffic between Asia and the West. About a dozen cables run through the area, with more planned.

These bundles of fiber optics, about the thickness of a garden hose, “are extremely important,” says Tim Stronge, vice president for research at TeleGeography, which analyzes the telecommunications market. “More than 90 percent of all communication traffic between Europe and Asia goes via these cables.

Late last month, Seacom, a company that specializes in providing communications to African countries, noticed that data had stopped flowing on the line that runs from Mombasa, Kenya, through the Red Sea to Zafarana in Egypt.

At the same time, two cables connecting West to East were knocked out, affecting 25 percent of traffic through the area, according to an estimate by HGC Global Communications, a Hong Kong-based telecommunications company.

In an interview from his office in Johannesburg, Prenesh Padyachee, Seacom’s chief digital and operations officer, said the damage to his company’s cable occurred at the bottom of the Red Sea, in Yemeni waters about 200 meters deep. The two other damaged cables are nearby.

It is still not clear what disabled the cables. Suspicion has focused on Houthi rebels in Yemen, but the Houthis, who have attacked numerous ships in the area in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza during the war between Israel and Hamas, have denied responsibility.

Mr Padayachee said the cause of the damage would remain unknown until a repair ship managed to pull up the wire and examine it. Candidates include an anchor dragged by a ship, a seabed disturbance, or sabotage. “We won’t know until we lift the cable,” he said.

Arranging repairs proves difficult. Seacom is working with a company called E-marine, which has boats in nearby Oman, to tackle the problem, but Mr Padayeechee acknowledged that the task will require assessing the political situation and obtaining permits from Yemen .

He said he hoped work could start sometime next month.

Although Seacom has managed to reroute most of its Internet traffic through other cables, Mr. Padayachee said he was annoyed by regional instability that has hampered repair efforts. “We would prefer to have definitive timelines that are not dictated by geopolitical situations,” he said.

It is also a concern that there are so many cables running through such an unstable area. Individual lines are relatively easy to damage. While cables are buried and armored near the coast, they lie further out to sea with little protection on the bottom.

Mr Stronge estimated that there are roughly 500 submarine cables worldwide and that an average of 100 breaks occur each year. Usually some kind of marine accident, such as dragging an anchor, turns out to be the cause, he said.

Mr Stronge said the vulnerability of individual cables was offset by the redundancy operators had built into the system. He said that even if all the cables in the Red Sea were cut, internet traffic, like tankers, could be diverted around the Cape of Good Hope at the tip of Africa or east through Singapore, Japan and through the United States to Europe. “It’s slower, but it can be done,” he said.