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Internet connection is sustained through underwater cables; troubles arise when they converge in one location.
On June 7, the 15,500-mile seabed route of the Asia-Africa-Europe-1 Internet cable, also known as AAE-1, was cut, knocking millions of people offline and causing brief internet outages.
The cable was disconnected after passing across land through Egypt, which also damaged another cable.
“It affected about seven countries and several over-the-top services,” Rosalind Thomas, managing director of SAEx International Management, which intends to build a new underwater cable linking Africa, Asia, and the US, claimed.
“The worst was Ethiopia, which lost 90 per cent of its connectivity, and Somalia after that also 85 per cent.” The subsequent analysis revealed that disruptions also affected cloud services provided by Google, Amazon, and Microsoft.
Although the connection was quickly restored, the outage shows how vulnerable the world’s 550 or so subsea internet cables are and how crucial Egypt and the Red Sea are to the internet’s infrastructure.
Sixteen of these submerged cables traverse the Red Sea, span 1,200 miles from Europe to Asia, and are frequently barely thicker than hosepipes and susceptible to damage from earthquakes and ship anchors. In the past two decades, the route has become one of the world’s most significant internet chokepoints and, arguably, the internet’s most vulnerable location.
“Where there are chokepoints, there are single points of failure,” Nicole Starosielski, an author on underwater cables and an associate professor of media, culture, and communication at New York University said, “Because it’s a site of intense concentration of global movement, that does make it more vulnerable than many places around the world.”
According to Alan Mauldin, research director at the telecom market research company TeleGeography, the new route, anticipated to be completed in 2024, will probably pave the way for additional cables to pass via Israel.
In the end, Egypt will always be the hub of internet links between Europe and Asia. Mauldin argues that since everyone depends on the world’s underwater internet connections, more needs to be done to secure them.
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