الشبكة اليمنية للعلوم والبيئة (يمن ساينس) موقع يهتم بأخبار العلوم والتكنولوجيا والصحة والبيئة والسكان
مقالات مشابهة
By: Abdulrahman Abotaleb
A few days ago, millions of people around the world noticed their Microsoft services slow to a crawl. Video calls dropped, documents failed to load, and entire offices found themselves suddenly disconnected. The culprit was not a software bug but something far more distant and fragile: several undersea cables cut near Jeddah in the Red Sea.
This was not the first such disruption. Europe has suffered outages in recent years, with speculation about Russian involvement. The Middle East has endured repeated cyberattacks and interruptions. Together, these incidents reveal an uncomfortable truth: the Internet, which many imagine as an abstract “cloud”, depends on hundreds of vulnerable physical arteries running across the ocean floor.
More than 400 submarine cables carry roughly 95 percent of global Internet traffic. These cables are the twenty-first century’s version of shipping lanes and trade routes. Instead of silk or spices, they carry the lifeblood of the global economy: financial transactions, government communications, business contracts, and the personal exchanges that bind families across continents.
Yet they are remarkably fragile. A ship’s anchor, a natural disaster, or a deliberate act of sabotage can snap a cable and unleash chaos. When one or two cables fail, markets stall, hospitals struggle, and millions lose access to essential services.
This vulnerability has not escaped the attention of world powers. The United States, China, and Russia increasingly treat submarine cables as strategic assets and potential leverage points in geopolitical rivalries. At the same time, private technology giants like Google, Meta, and Microsoft have begun funding their own dedicated cables. In doing so, they have blurred the line between corporate innovation and geopolitical influence. The Internet, once celebrated as a neutral global commons, has become entangled in a high-stakes contest for control.
The Middle East sits at the heart of this struggle. Cables that connect Asia and Europe pass through choke points like the Suez Canal, the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz. This geography makes the region indispensable but also uniquely exposed to conflict and instability. An incident here is not a regional issue; it is a global shockwave.
Even more troubling is the absence of a comprehensive governance framework. There is no binding international treaty that ensures the protection of undersea cables, no clear mechanism for accountability when outages occur, and little public awareness of how dependent our daily lives have become on these hidden systems.
The worst-case scenario is chilling: in the event of a large-scale conflict, submarine cables could become deliberate military targets. A coordinated attack could paralyze economies, cut off critical communications, and fracture the Internet into isolated fragments.
It does not have to come to that. History offers a model. Centuries ago, nations recognized that global trade by sea required shared rules, protections, and laws. Maritime conventions were created to protect shipping lanes, ensuring commerce could flow despite political rivalries. The digital economy now demands a similar commitment: an international agreement to safeguard the “digital shipping lanes” beneath our oceans.
The stakes are enormous. The Internet is no longer a luxury; it is the backbone of modern life. It powers education, health care, commerce, finance, governance, and the intimate connections of families separated by geography. Leaving its lifelines unprotected is not just shortsighted; it is reckless.
The question is not whether the world can afford to protect undersea cables but whether we can survive without doing so. The time has come for governments, corporations, and civil society to treat these hidden arteries with the urgency they deserve. Our shared digital future depends on it.
