Red Sea and Hormuz Both Closed: What Losing Two Chokepoints Means

Both of the major internet chokepoints between Asia and Europe are simultaneously degraded or under threat in April 2026. The Red Sea cables — AAE-1, SEACOM, and EIG — were cut during Houthi operations in late 2023 and early 2024 and remain at reduced capacity. Iran's IRGC, through IRGC-linked media, is now threatening Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman cables on April 22, 2026. Alcatel Submarine Networks has declared force majeure for Persian Gulf cable maintenance operations.

Two chokepoints, two simultaneous disruption vectors, no good reroute option for both at once. This is the internet infrastructure situation as of today.

The Two Chokepoints: Why They Matter

All internet traffic between Asia (India, Southeast Asia, East Asia) and Europe travels through one of two geographic chokepoints. There is no third option that does not add 60-150 milliseconds of latency and several thousand kilometres of cable distance.

Chokepoint 1 — The Red Sea / Suez approach: Cables from the Indian Ocean run up the Red Sea, through the Suez Canal area, and into the Mediterranean toward Europe. This route handles the majority of east-west internet traffic — estimates range from 17-25% of all global internet traffic. The key cables: AAE-1 (Asia-Africa-Europe 1), SEA-ME-WE 5 and SEA-ME-WE 6, EIG (Europe India Gateway), SEACOM, and 2Africa (eastern segment). Landing hubs: Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; Djibouti; Suez/Alexandria, Egypt; Marseille, France.

Chokepoint 2 — The Persian Gulf / Gulf of Oman approach: Cables from the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia run through the Gulf of Oman toward the Persian Gulf, connecting the Gulf states (UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain), and also converging with cables that continue up the Gulf toward Kuwait and Iraq. This route is less about east-west transit and more about Gulf state connectivity — the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait depend on Gulf of Oman cable connections for their international connectivity. Key cables: AAE-1 (which splits here — one branch toward Red Sea, one toward Gulf), FALCON, Gulf Bridge International, SEA-ME-WE 6. Landing hubs: Fujairah, UAE (the largest cable hub in the Gulf); Muscat, Oman; Karachi, Pakistan.

These two chokepoints are geographically close — the Red Sea mouth (Bab-el-Mandeb strait) and the Gulf of Oman entrance to Hormuz are approximately 1,200km apart. Cables often branch at junction points in the Arabian Sea, sending traffic either north through the Red Sea or northeast toward the Gulf. When both branches are disrupted, the traffic has nowhere to go except the alternative route around the Cape of Good Hope.

Status of Red Sea Cables: Partially Degraded Since 2024

The Red Sea cable damage from 2023-2024 Houthi operations has been documented but not fully resolved:

AAE-1: Cut in the Red Sea in early 2024. Partial repair was attempted but force majeure for Red Sea operations has slowed full restoration. Operating at reduced capacity — approximately 60-70% of nominal.

SEACOM: Damaged in 2024. SEACOM primarily serves East Africa connectivity, but its Red Sea segment carries Indian Ocean traffic. Partially repaired via the Cape route restoration.

EIG (Europe India Gateway): Cut in 2024. EIG is a major India-Europe transit cable. Full repair deferred pending security clearance for repair vessel operations in the Red Sea.

The cumulative effect: approximately 25-30% reduction in Asia-Europe bandwidth via the Red Sea route, with increased latency on routes that were rerouted around Africa. The Cape of Good Hope rerouting added approximately 100-150ms of round-trip time to Asia-Europe paths.

This matters for April 2026 because the Red Sea damage reduced the reserve capacity available to absorb Persian Gulf disruption. Normally, if the Gulf of Oman cables are degraded, traffic reroutes via the Red Sea. But the Red Sea is already degraded. The safety net that should absorb Gulf of Oman disruption is operating below capacity.

Status of Persian Gulf Cables: At Risk Since April 22

The IRGC threat to Persian Gulf cables, signaled through Tasnim News Agency on April 22, 2026, has produced Alcatel Submarine Networks force majeure notices for Persian Gulf operations. No cables have been confirmed cut as of today — the threat is prospective. But force majeure in effect means:

Any fault goes unrepaired. Cable faults occur regularly through commercial shipping anchor drag and seabed movement — the Persian Gulf averages 5-8 cable incidents per year. With ASN standing down, these routine faults accumulate without repair.

Deliberate cuts would go unrepaired for months. The Red Sea precedent is the timeline: 2024 cuts took months to partially repair, and they are still not at full capacity 12-18 months later. A deliberate IRGC cable cut in the Gulf of Oman would produce the same multi-month repair timeline — if geopolitical conditions allowed repair at all.

Gulf state connectivity is specifically at risk. The UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar all depend on Persian Gulf cable connections for their international internet. The Red Sea reroute option works for India-Europe traffic but does not adequately substitute for Gulf-terminating connections. Gulf state cloud regions (AWS ME-South Bahrain, Azure UAE North, Google Cloud ME Central) would face direct connectivity degradation.

The Cape of Good Hope: The Last Reroute Option

If both chokepoints are disrupted simultaneously, the only reroute option is around the Cape of Good Hope — the southern tip of Africa. Traffic from India or Southeast Asia can travel west across the Indian Ocean, around southern Africa, and up the Atlantic toward Europe.

The problem is capacity and latency:

Capacity: The Cape reroute relies primarily on cables that run along the African coast — WACS (West Africa Cable System), SAT-3/SAFE, and the 2Africa cable (which has a West Africa segment). These cables were designed to serve African connectivity, not as primary Asia-Europe transit paths. Their aggregate capacity is significantly below what the Red Sea and Persian Gulf routes handle. You cannot reroute all Asia-Europe traffic through cables designed for a fraction of that volume without severe congestion.

Latency: Asia-to-Europe via Cape of Good Hope is approximately 20,000-22,000km of cable distance, adding 100-150ms of round-trip time compared to the Red Sea route. For latency-sensitive applications — real-time API calls, video conferencing, financial transactions, gaming — this latency increase is functionally disruptive. An LLM inference call from a European client to an Asian data centre at 150ms additional round-trip is a different application experience from the same call at 30ms.

Reliability: The Cape reroute is not a designed redundancy path for this traffic volume. It is a last-resort path. When traffic is rerouted en masse to an undersized path, packet loss increases, jitter increases, and TCP performance degrades before the raw bandwidth limit is reached.

Cloud Infrastructure Impact by Region

For developers and infrastructure teams, the dual chokepoint scenario maps to specific cloud region impacts:

AWS ME-South (Bahrain): Depends primarily on Gulf of Oman cables for its connectivity to EU-West and AP-Southeast. A Persian Gulf cable disruption increases inter-region latency to all non-Gulf regions significantly. AWS's Bahrain region was specifically chosen for Gulf state proximity — its low latency advantage over EU-West disappears if cable connectivity degrades.

Azure UAE North: Same dependencies as AWS ME-South. Azure's UAE North region serves the largest concentration of enterprise workloads in the Gulf. Gulf cable disruption directly impacts Azure UAEs inter-region peering performance.

Google Cloud ME Central (Doha, Qatar): Google's newest ME region was added specifically for Gulf state data residency requirements. Fully dependent on Gulf cable connectivity.

EU-West regions (Ireland, Netherlands, Frankfurt): Less directly affected by Persian Gulf disruption — EU regions route primarily through Atlantic cables and Mediterranean-terminating Red Sea routes. But Red Sea degradation increases latency from EU to Asia, and sustained degradation of both chokepoints concentrates EU-Asia traffic on the Cape route, increasing congestion on paths that EU regions depend on for Asia connectivity.

US-East regions: Least affected — US-East connects to Europe via Atlantic cables (largely unaffected) and to Asia via Pacific cables (unaffected). US-East to Gulf states is the most affected path, routing through either Atlantic-Mediterranean or degraded Red Sea segments.

Developer Action Items for Dual Chokepoint Scenario

The infrastructure checklist for teams with workloads in or routing through affected regions:

Latency baseline now. Run synthetic monitoring from your ME cloud regions to EU-West and AP-Southeast targets. Establish baseline numbers so any cable degradation manifests as measurable deviation rather than ambiguous slowness.

Test your failover paths. If your application serves Gulf state users and routes via ME regions, test what happens when ME-to-EU latency increases from 30ms to 180ms. Does your application timeout? Does your load balancer failover correctly? Test it now, not during a live cable event.

DNS TTL and traffic engineering. Reduce DNS TTLs on records pointing to ME region endpoints. Lower TTLs allow faster DNS-based failover if cable disruption requires shifting traffic away from degraded ME regions to EU-West or US-East.

CDN edge consideration. Cloudflare, Fastly, and Akamai all have Gulf state Points of Presence (PoPs). These PoPs depend on the same cable infrastructure. CDN edge performance for Gulf-state users will degrade with cable disruption. If your CDN has origin-pull paths through Gulf PoPs, test alternative origin configurations.

Satellite backup for critical paths. Starlink and OneWeb provide low-Earth-orbit satellite internet with approximately 30-80ms latency. For applications where cable disruption is catastrophic, satellite connectivity provides a backup path that is fully independent of both Red Sea and Persian Gulf cable routes.

Key Takeaways

• Both major internet chokepoints between Asia and Europe are simultaneously compromised: Red Sea cables (AAE-1, SEACOM, EIG) cut in 2023-2024, operating at 70-75% capacity with Alcatel force majeure still in effect; Persian Gulf cables threatened by IRGC with Alcatel force majeure issued April 22, 2026
• The safety net does not exist: normally Red Sea damage would reroute via Persian Gulf; normally Gulf damage would reroute via Red Sea; with both disrupted, the only option is Cape of Good Hope — a capacity and latency-constrained path designed for African connectivity, not Asia-Europe transit
• Cape of Good Hope reroute: adds 100-150ms round-trip latency; has significantly less capacity than combined Red Sea and Gulf routes; reliability degrades under traffic volume it was not designed to handle
• Gulf cloud regions most exposed: AWS ME-South, Azure UAE North, Google Cloud ME Central all depend on Persian Gulf cables; Red Sea reroute does not adequately substitute for Gulf-terminating connections — these regions face direct connectivity degradation
• EU and US regions are partially insulated: EU-West routes primarily via Atlantic and Mediterranean cables; US-East via Atlantic and Pacific; both are affected by increased congestion on shared paths but not directly disrupted
• Developer action: baseline ME region latency now; test failover paths at 150ms ME-to-EU latency; reduce DNS TTLs; evaluate satellite backup for critical Gulf state paths

For the IRGC cable threat announcement, read Iran Threatens Internet Cables: Digital Catastrophe Warning April 2026. For the IRGC ship seizures that preceded the cable threat, read IRGC Seizes Two Ships in Hormuz Hours After Trump Extends Ceasefire. For Gulf cloud infrastructure cyber risk, read Iran Declares AWS, Google, and Microsoft Data Centers Military Targets.