Red Sea Undersea Cables 2026: How a 25% Asia–Europe Traffic Cut Hits Internet, Cloud, and AI

While USA–Israel–Iran tensions dominate headlines, another quieter infrastructure story is unfolding: **multiple undersea communication cables in the Red Sea have been damaged, disrupting a significant share of data traffic between Asia and Europe.** Telecom operators have estimated that up to **25% of capacity on key routes was affected at points during these incidents**.[3][5]

This piece looks at what actually broke, how traffic is being rerouted, and what it means for cloud, AI tools, and developers building global applications.

## 1. What Happened in the Red Sea?

Several major undersea cables running through the Red Sea corridor — including Seacom, TGN-Gulf, Asia-Africa-Europe 1 (AAE-1), and Europe India Gateway (EIG) — have reported damage over the last cycles of conflict and naval activity in the region.[3][5] Some reports linked the disruption to Houthi activity; the group publicly blamed US and UK naval operations for "glitches" but denied deliberately cutting cables.

The key point for builders: the Red Sea is a **critical shortcut** between Europe and Asia, and multiple cables share that narrow seabed route. Conflict and naval operations there increase the risk of accidental or intentional damage.

## 2. How Cable Cuts Affect the Internet

When a cable fails, global routing protocols automatically shift traffic:

- To alternative submarine routes (for example, around the Cape of Good Hope)
- To overland paths through the Middle East, Russia, or Central Asia where available
- In extreme cases, to satellite links

This preserves connectivity but introduces trade-offs:

- **Higher latency** as packets travel longer physical distances
- **Congestion** on remaining routes
- **Uneven impact** depending on each ISP's alternative paths

Users in East Africa, the Gulf, South Asia, and parts of Europe and East Asia may see slower connections, higher jitter, and occasional timeouts when multiple incidents line up.

## 3. Cloud, SaaS, and AI Tooling

Cloud and SaaS platforms sit on top of the same physical infrastructure:

- Cross-region traffic between EU and APAC regions may see higher latency.
- Replication and backup traffic can slow down.
- Content delivery networks reroute traffic through alternative points of presence.

For AI tools (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity) and AI APIs:

- Queries from Asia and Africa often traverse submarine cables to reach US or EU data centres.
- Red Sea incidents can cause **latency spikes** for AI API calls or streaming responses.
- Developers may experience timeouts or slower responses during incident windows.

## 4. What Developers Should Do About Cable Risk

You cannot prevent cable cuts, but you can design for them.

**Know your regions**

- Map where your users are and which cloud regions they hit.
- Avoid hard coupling between distant regions for latency-sensitive paths.

**Graceful degradation**

- Use timeouts and fallbacks for cross-region calls.
- Cache responses and use stale-while-revalidate patterns where possible.
- Ensure non-critical features (analytics, recommendations) can fail without breaking core flows (auth, checkout).

**Multi-region resilience**

- Consider region-local read replicas and queues with eventual consistency.
- Have a documented "degraded global mode" for when cross-region links are impaired.

**Observability and communication**

- Monitor latency and error rates by region and provider.
- Maintain a playbook for responding to submarine cable incidents, including customer communication.

## 5. The Bigger Picture

Red Sea cable incidents are a tangible example of how **physical infrastructure, geopolitics, and software performance** intersect. A damaged cable in a conflict zone can slow down AI APIs, SaaS tools, and apps thousands of kilometres away.

For developers and founders, the lesson is simple: **design like the network will occasionally be weird, especially across continents.** Latency spikes and partial outages are not edge cases anymore — they are a predictable consequence of how the world and its infrastructure really work.

Related reading:

- [Undersea Cables, Middle East Conflict, and Internet Infrastructure Risk in 2026](/blog/undersea-cables-middle-east-conflict-internet-infrastructure-risk-2026)
- [Strait of Hormuz 2026: What Happens to Cloud and Tech If Oil Transit Is Disrupted](/blog/strait-of-hormuz-2026-cloud-oil-tech-developer-impact)