Fiber optic cable cut in the Red Sea causes intermittent internet access across Asia and the Middle East.

Microsoft has warned of cloud service disruptions due to a fiber optic cable cut in the Red Sea. There had been earlier concerns that cables in the Red Sea could be targeted by Houthi forces.

There have been concerns that cables in the Red Sea could become targets for Houthi forces - Photo: see.news

Experts say a fiber optic cable outage in the Red Sea disrupted internet access in some areas of Asia and the Middle East on July 7-9. The cause of the outage is still unknown.

In a statement, NetBlocks, an internet access monitoring company, noted that a series of undersea cable failures in the Red Sea have degraded internet connectivity in several countries, including India and Pakistan.

NetBlocks also stated that the incident affected the SMW4 and IMEWE cable systems, near Jeddah in Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia has not yet responded to this information. Meanwhile, in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), internet users on the state-owned Du and Etisalat networks have reported slow internet connections.

At the same time, Microsoft warned users of its Microsoft Azure cloud computing service that they could experience service disruptions due to multiple undersea fiber optic cables being severed in the Red Sea region.

Specifically, data traffic passing through the Middle East, with its origin or destination in Asia and Europe, may experience more disruptions than usual.

"Undersea cable breaks typically take a long time to fix. During this time, we will continuously monitor, adjust, and optimize routing to minimize the impact on customers. Microsoft will provide daily updates, or sooner if there are new developments," the company said.

Due to network disruptions, Azure – the world's second-largest cloud service provider after Amazon Web Services (AWS) – had to reroute traffic through alternative routes, resulting in higher-than-normal latency.

There had previously been concerns that cables in the Red Sea would become targets for Houthi forces in Yemen, in order to pressure Israel to end the conflict in the Gaza Strip. However, the Houthis stated they had no plans to attack the underwater cable system.

Back to the topic

VNA

Source: https://tuoitre.vn/dut-cap-quang-o-bien-do-internet-o-chau-a-va-trung-dong-chap-chon-2025090718231201.htm