In February 2024, the cargo vessel Rubymar, struck by a Houthi missile in the Red Sea, drifted with its anchor dragging across the seabed and severed three major submarine cables: the Asia-Africa-Europe 1, the Europe India Gateway, and SEACOM. Nearly 25 percent of internet traffic between Asia, Europe, and the Middle East went dark. Over 100 million people across more than a dozen African countries lost connectivity for up to ten days. Ghana, Liberia, and Côte d'Ivoire went offline entirely. In September 2025, two more cables were cut near Jeddah. Repairs take weeks under normal conditions. Under fire, repair ships cannot hold position at all.
The Red Sea hosts around 17 submarine cables carrying roughly 80% of Asia's westward data traffic. Every one passes through the Bab al-Mandab Strait, a 26-kilometer gap between Yemen and Djibouti.
There was no alternative route in 1870, either.
That year, a chain of cable companies completed the first submarine telegraph link from England to India, running from Suez through the Red Sea to Aden and onward to Bombay. On June 6, 1870, the final section of what became known as the Red Sea Line landed at Porthcurno, a cove in Cornwall that became the nerve center of the British Empire's global communications. By 1876, eleven cables fanned out from that single beach, connecting London to New Zealand.
The strategic vulnerability was obvious almost immediately. On the first day of World War I, the British Navy cut five German cables. Whoever controlled the physical routes controlled the information. By World War II, Porthcurno carried roughly 70 percent of Britain's external communications. The military moved critical operations into tunnels carved into the cliffs above the beach, because a single bombing raid on one Cornish cove could have severed an empire's ability to coordinate.
Porthcurno is still a cable landing station. Fifteen cables now come ashore along the Cornish coast, connecting to all G7 countries except Canada. Routes established by Victorian cable companies became the preferred pathways for every subsequent generation of cable, including the fiber optic lines that carry the modern internet. The beach through which telegraph cables once ran now receives glass.
Submarine cables carry 99 percent of intercontinental internet traffic. That fact alone makes every geographic bottleneck a single point of failure for the global economy. The Strait of Malacca threads cables between Malaysia and Indonesia through a corridor that mattered for telegraph routes and matters identically now. Waters around Egypt carry so much of the world's data that the concentration itself is the vulnerability. Copper became coaxial became glass. Morse code became packet switching.
The cables still pass through the same narrow water, past the same contested coastlines. The strait is still 26 kilometers wide. The sea is still shallow. And the cove in Cornwall is still where the cables come ashore. Geography doesn't get a software update.