The severance of undersea cables in the Red Sea is causing internet outages in Asia and Africa. In more than 40 years of the internet, as a whole, it has never stopped completely working. Parts of it do break at times, but the way it has been built gives it a resilience that is assuring. The internet represents a decentralized, distributed network of innumerable computers, zillions of routers, connected by maybe billions of kilometers of cables. And a large part of these cables are transcontinental, passing under the oceans and seas.

The submarine cable system carries 99% of the internet traffic across the globe. As users we never think of the physical dimensions of the internet, but the fact is that the seemingly formless web runs on a physical edifice. When some cable gets disrupted, packets of data find their way through alternate routes, and we as users never experience a glitch.

As per data one of these cables gets cut every three days or so, for a variety of reasons. However, users rarely feel the pinch because firstly the data routes through an alternate cable. There are about 552 undersea cables running up to 1.4 million kms across the globe, and there is enough spare space for the data that is facing a cut cable. Secondly, a fleet of about 60 repair ships are on standby to fix broken cables around the world.

The cables in the Red Sea are critical because they are 11 in number, and nearly all information flows from Europe to Asia passes through the cables at the bottom of the Red Sea. The cables under the Earth’s waters are equally vulnerable to politics and conflict as is the land. While the cause of the cuts is being explored and they are being repaired, outages are sending alarm bells. Suddenly users are also realizing that the internet is also linked to the limits of the physical world. The digital world exists on the foundations of the physical world.

Cables under the sea, carrying data and information are critical for the smooth functioning, and the expansion of the internet to places where the users are still low. Long distance land cables are hard to lay and maintain across different and rugged terrains. But laying undersea cables is an expensive proposition. Early telecom consortiums laid them; nowadays cloud companies like Google and Meta are doing the same. Operators have mostly not let real world conflicts affect the flow of data. However, as geopolitics changes rapidly that may not be the case in the future.

Which company or country controls the physical edifice of the internet will become important. As the dependence of everyday living on the internet grows by leaps and bounds, the ownership and security of the physical will once again become primary in the smooth functioning of the digital.

Published in the Lokmat in March 2024