Welcome to Our Digital Fragile Lives!

Picture yourself in Mumbai, racing to get into a Zoom call, when your screen is frozen or, in South Korea, someone’s Netflix marathon is interrupted, leaving them suspended at the end of their favourite show. The outage hit several countries, including India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the UAE, reminding us again that in our globalised world, we’re all just a cable cut from entering the digital stone age.

Cables cut, switch is not functional, router is providing amber/green light, or LAN is gone. Numerous more such lines have become a familiar sound to our ears, particularly if you and your job are Internet-oriented, supporting all of us in this age of the Internet. The Internet, an interconnection of networks, has its backbone comprised of undersea cables, satellite links, and land-based cables.

The old symphony was played once more this Sunday morning: IT departments all over Asia and the Middle East collectively groaned as their phones blew up with the same old refrain of “the Internet is down.” Red Sea undersea cable cuts caused Internet outages in some areas of Asia and the Middle East. Overnight, millions of people learned what their great-grandparents had always known, that occasionally you can’t get to everyone you want to, when you want to.

The culprit this time around? Major subsea systems like the South East Asia–Middle East–Western Europe 4 (SMW4) decided to hang up their boots, or more specifically, someone or something decided for them. The reason is as apparent as your video call quality peak-hours-through: completely foggy.

In the grand tradition of Internet outages or Internet Shutdown, the speculation game began immediately. There has been concern about cables being targeted by Yemen’s Houthi rebels, which the insurgents explain as an effort to pressure Israel to end its war on Hamas in the Gaza Strip. However, the Houthis have denied attacking the lines, leaving everyone to play the world’s least fun guessing game.

The timing is especially significant, as it coincides with ongoing tensions in the area. It’s a sort of digital war with the victim being our combined capability to stream, shop, and share cat memes across the globe. Between November 2023 and December 2024, the Houthis hit over 100 vessels with missiles and drones. Therefore, suspicion tends to fall their way even though they’re playing the “wasn’t me” game more vigorously than a toddler caught with cookie crumbles on his face.

Here’s the thing that would be hilarious if it weren’t so crucial to modern civilisation: this isn’t exactly breaking news. Cable cuts happen with the regularity of a Swiss watch, approximately 150 times per year globally. It’s as if the universe is reminding us that our digital omnipotence has some very analog vulnerabilities.

We’ve built a world where a teenager in Tokyo can video chat with his grandparents in Tehran, a programmer in Karachi can talk to colleagues in Riyadh, and a student in Dubai can attend virtual classes organised in New Delhi. All of this magic travels through cables, no thicker than a garden hose lying there vulnerably on the ocean floors with anchors, fishing nets, natural disasters, or, presumably, the odd geopolitical tantrum in between.

As millions of users vainly refreshed their browsers and rebooted their routers, because honestly, that’s always the first thing to try, the true heroes were already on the move. Somewhere out there in the world’s 60 cable ships, sailors were likely taking deep breaths, setting down their coffee, and bracing themselves for another emergency mission to the Red Sea.

These sea-faring IT warriors have repair kits at the ready in harbors all over the world, because in the game of keeping humankind together, preparedness is not only a Boy Scout slogan, it’s a matter of survival. They’ll cast off into the ocean, find the cut cables with high-tech gear, pull them up from the seafloor (picture fishing, but with the Internet), reconnect them with jumper cables, and send them plunging into the depths.

It’s a high-tech precision operation coupled with good old-fashioned elbow grease, all carried out by individuals who likely get seasick more than they get screen time, but keep our online world going.

While repair teams labor to re-establish complete connectivity and IT support staff answer another batch of “have you tried turning it off and on again?” calls, this latest Red Sea cable cut is a gentle reminder of an elemental truth: for all our cloud computing and wireless this and wireless that, the Internet itself remains very much a physical entity, with physical weaknesses, kept up by actual people doing actual work in the real world.

So the next time your video call fails or your site takes a while to load, consider the cables quietly beached on ocean bottoms, transmitting our digital fantasies and memes to the world. They’re doing their best, and when they break down, individuals are waiting to set sail and repair them, splice by splice.

After all, someone has to maintain the cat memes and videos coming. Civilization is counting on it.