Red Sea Cable Damage Disrupts Indian Internet to Europe

New Delhi, September 11: For the past week, India’s internet has felt slower in ways that are hard to ignore. A video call with a client in London takes longer to connect. Stock traders complain about lag when routing trades through Frankfurt. Even gamers notice an extra beat between a click in Mumbai and a server in Europe. The reason lies thousands of kilometers away, under the waters of the Red Sea.

A Hidden Lifeline Snapped

On September 6, several major undersea cables near Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, were cut. Among them were some of India’s most important international links, SMW-4 and IMEWE. Together, they act like arteries carrying the country’s digital lifeblood westward into Europe.

When they broke, internet traffic didn’t stop outright, but it had to take the long way around. Instead of a relatively straight shot through the Middle East, data was pushed through longer routes around Africa or across different land paths. That detour means delays, or what engineers call higher latency.

“It’s like having to drive from Delhi to Jaipur via Chennai,” one network analyst told me. “You’ll still reach, but not on time.”

What The Slowdown Looks Like

The slowdown isn’t catastrophic, but it’s noticeable. Kentik, an internet monitoring firm, tracked a jump in round-trip times between Mumbai and Frankfurt, a core route for cloud services. Microsoft Azure warned customers of “higher latency” for any traffic that normally passed through the Middle East.

For everyday browsing, the effect is mild. But for sectors that depend on real-time responsiveness, such as finance, outsourcing, gaming, and video calls the difference can sting. A few dozen extra milliseconds might sound trivial, yet in the world of algorithmic trading or remote IT operations, those milliseconds can cost real money.

The Indian Angle

India, with its sprawling IT services sector, is especially exposed. Call centers that handle European clients overnight, offshore developers working with London or Berlin teams, and cloud services that link businesses across continents are all dealing with the ripple effects.

Local internet providers have scrambled to reroute traffic, often buying capacity at a premium. Some of that cost will quietly be passed down to businesses. Others will simply absorb the slowdown and hope the situation improves quickly.

How It Happened

Early reports suggest the cuts were accidental. Anchors from commercial ships are believed to have dragged across the shallow seabed, damaging the fiber. It’s not the first time this has happened in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, where heavy shipping and a dense cluster of cables make for a fragile combination.

Fixing the problem won’t be quick. Cable repair ships need permits, calm weather, and sometimes naval escorts in politically sensitive waters. Engineers talk in weeks, not days. Some cables could remain impaired well into October.

Bigger Picture Worries

The outage has reignited old fears about India’s reliance on the Red Sea corridor. It’s a single choke point that carries most of our internet traffic to Europe. If it falters, the entire system groans.

Experts have long argued for more redundancy, whether through land routes across Central Asia, new undersea lines via the Bay of Bengal, or even satellite backups. Each option comes with costs and political hurdles. But the events of this month underline what’s at stake.

As one telecom executive put it, “We talk about being a global digital hub. That dream doesn’t work if a single anchor in the Red Sea can slow the whole show down.”

What’s Next

For now, Indian users and businesses will live with the delays. Cloud providers are fine-tuning routing to ease the pressure, but physics can’t be tricked; longer routes will always mean longer waits.

Still, the internet didn’t go dark, and that in itself is a testament to the backup systems in place. The crisis is more of a warning than a disaster. But it’s a sharp reminder the internet may feel invisible, but its foundations are fragile wires lying on the ocean floor.

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