What is the story about?
The clearest immediate sign that the war is already affecting this sector came from Meta’s 2Africa project. Reporting last week said Meta paused work on
the Persian Gulf segment of the giant 2Africa cable, while contractor Alcatel Submarine Networks issued force majeure notices and its cable ship Île de Batz was left stranded near Dammam in Saudi Arabia. That matters because it shows the conflict is not only threatening existing digital routes; it is also delaying the build-out of new capacity meant to improve resilience across the Gulf and surrounding regions.
Red Sea And Hormuz Are Digital Choke Points Too
The Red Sea is already recognised as one of the world’s most important subsea data corridors. Capacity-related reporting and later strategic analyses have pointed to the dense concentration of international cable systems there, linking Europe to Asia and Africa through a relatively narrow maritime passage. Last year’s Red Sea cable cuts, which affected systems including SMW4 and IMEWE, disrupted connectivity and increased latency for users in India and across parts of West Asia, offering a real-world reminder of how exposed this infrastructure can be.
The Strait of Hormuz is smaller in geography but no less important in regional digital terms. TeleGeography said last week that active cable systems traversing the strait include AAE-1, FALCON, the Gulf Bridge International Cable System and Tata-TGN Gulf. These routes help connect Gulf data centres and traffic exchanges to wider international networks. In practical terms, that makes Hormuz not just an oil chokepoint, but a communications chokepoint as well.
That is where the risk calculation changes. Undersea cables are not easy targets in the Hollywood sense, but they are vulnerable to disruption from anchors, accidents, seabed activity and, in conflict zones, military operations or mining. The user-provided input correctly notes that the Red Sea’s relative shallowness has long been seen as a vulnerability, and similar concern now extends to Gulf waters as the war sharpens across adjacent states. The fact that commercial work has already paused in the Gulf lends that concern more weight than a purely theoretical discussion.
The Real Threat Is Disruption, Not Instant Digital Darkness
That said, some of the more sweeping claims circulating online do not hold up cleanly. It is true that undersea cables carry the overwhelming majority of international internet traffic, with one academic survey citing more than 95 per cent and around $10 trillion in daily financial transactions moving through these systems. But it is much harder to support claims that 30 per cent of the world’s internet passes specifically through Hormuz, or that there is “no Plan B” at all.
In reality, networks do reroute, redundancy exists, and damage to one route does not automatically produce global blackout conditions. The danger is severe degradation, congestion, latency spikes and regional outages—not necessarily total darkness.
That distinction is important for a professional reading of the story. The real warning sign is cumulative stress. First, commercial cable construction is delayed. Second, the Red Sea has already shown how quickly cuts can affect India and the wider region. Third, the Gulf now sits inside an active war map. If existing cable corridors in the Red Sea or the Strait of Hormuz were damaged at the same time that new resilience projects were stalled, the knock-on effects could hit finance, cloud services, enterprise networks and state communications far beyond the Middle East.
So the sharper question is not whether Iran can “switch off the internet” overnight. It is whether the war is bringing one of the world’s most critical but least visible infrastructure systems into the risk envelope. On the evidence available so far, that question is no longer hypothetical. The missiles may dominate the headlines. But under the sea, the pressure is already building.
