368ms to Dodge a War: How Red Sea Cable Cuts Reroute the Internet

Right now, somewhere between Muscat and Brisbane, a data packet is taking the scenic route. Instead of diving into the Red Sea, racing through the Suez Canal corridor alongside one of the world's busiest shipping lanes, and emerging in the Mediterranean in under 60 milliseconds, that packet is being shunted westward through the Arabian Sea, around the tip of India, across the FLAG Europe-Asia cable's western segment to Marseille, then hopping to London, back east through Singapore, and finally down to Australia. Total time: 368 milliseconds. The reason? Somewhere in Yemeni territorial waters, Houthi-linked activity has turned one of the planet's most critical submarine cable corridors into an uninsurable war zone. And our monitoring systems are measuring the consequences in real time.

The Damage: A Timeline of Destruction

The Red Sea carries roughly 17% of the world's submarine cable capacity. Between the coasts of Yemen, Djibouti, Eritrea, and Saudi Arabia, at least a dozen major cables thread through a narrow corridor no wider than 30 kilometers in some places. Starting in late 2023, as Houthi forces escalated attacks on commercial shipping in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, a new kind of collateral damage began to emerge: submarine cable cuts.

The first confirmed disruptions came in early 2024. AAE-1 (Asia-Africa-Europe-1), the 25,000-kilometer cable connecting Southeast Asia to Europe, reported degraded performance on its Red Sea segment. Within weeks, SEACOM and EIG (Europe India Gateway) followed. By mid-2024, at least four major cables had confirmed damage in the corridor between Saudi Arabia and Djibouti.

September 2025 brought the most significant blow yet: simultaneous cuts to SMW4 (SEA-ME-WE 4) and IMEWE (India-Middle East-Western Europe) near Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. These two cables alone carry a substantial portion of the traffic between the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, and Europe. India, Pakistan, and the UAE all reported measurable increases in latency and packet loss within hours.

The Houthi-controlled communications ministry in Yemen has denied involvement in cable damage. But the pattern is unmistakable: cables are being cut in waters where Houthi forces operate, where commercial vessels are being attacked, and where no repair ship is willing to go.

What Our Measurements Show

At GeoCables, we monitor submarine cable health through continuous RIPE Atlas traceroute and ping measurements. When cables work normally, traffic follows the shortest physical path. When they don't, traffic reroutes — and the latency tells the story. Here are three real routes captured by our monitoring system that illustrate the scale of the rerouting crisis.

Route 1: Oman to Australia — 368ms via Marseille

This route is extraordinary. Muscat to Marseille takes 237 milliseconds — roughly four times what it should be via a direct Red Sea transit (approximately 60ms). The packet leaves Oman on the Zain Omantel network (AS8529), hands off to FLAG Telecom (AS15412), and instead of heading north through the Red Sea to Egypt and into the Mediterranean, it travels the FLAG Europe-Asia cable's western segment — a much longer path that avoids the conflict zone entirely. From Marseille, it hops to London, then turns back east through Singapore to reach Australia. The packet essentially circumnavigates most of the globe to reach a destination that should be reachable in about a third of the time.

Route 2: Oman to Argentina — 363ms Through 6 Countries

The same starting pattern appears: Muscat to Marseille via the western FLAG segment, taking 237ms. From Marseille, the traffic crosses to Paris, jumps the Atlantic to Cheyenne, Wyoming, then to Ashburn, Virginia — the heart of US internet infrastructure — before heading south through São Paulo to Buenos Aires. The packet traverses six countries and two oceans. Under normal conditions, Middle Eastern traffic to South America would use Red Sea cables to reach European hubs more quickly, shaving tens of milliseconds off the journey.

Route 3: Nigeria to Indonesia — 395ms via the Cape

This is perhaps the most dramatic rerouting of all. Lagos-to-Jakarta traffic, which should logically cross Africa and transit the Red Sea corridor to reach Southeast Asia, instead goes south to Cape Town on Liquid Telecommunications (AS30844), then north to London, crosses the Atlantic to New York, traverses the entire United States to San Jose, and then takes NTT's famous transpacific route to Osaka and Tokyo before finally reaching Indonesia. The packet crosses four continents. The NTT transpacific detour — New York to San Jose to Osaka — is a well-known routing pattern, but it should never be the path for African traffic headed to Southeast Asia. Under normal conditions, that traffic would use Red Sea cables like EIG, SEACOM, or AAE-1 and arrive in roughly half the time.

The Oman Hub: 20 Cables, 8 Landing Points

Oman is not often mentioned alongside Singapore, Marseille, or Mumbai in discussions of global internet infrastructure. But it should be. The Sultanate has 20 submarine cables landing on its shores — more than Djibouti (12 cables), more than many European countries, and enough to make it a critical junction for traffic between Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.

These cables land at eight distinct points along the Omani coast:

Oman's geographic position is key. It sits at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, where the Strait of Hormuz meets the Arabian Sea. Cables landing in Oman can route either northward into the Gulf to reach the UAE, Qatar, and beyond, or westward through the Gulf of Aden into the Red Sea toward Egypt and Europe. When that westward path becomes unavailable — as it now has — Oman's cables become the starting point for increasingly creative rerouting.

The key cables transiting the Red Sea from or through Oman include some of the most important links in global telecommunications:

The numbers are striking. The 2Africa cable — Meta's massive 45,000 km system that circumnavigates the African continent — shows a healthy average RTT of just 30.9ms because it routes around Africa entirely, avoiding the Red Sea. Meanwhile, FLAG Europe-Asia and SEACOM/TGN-Eurasia, both of which rely on the Red Sea corridor, show RTTs of 285ms and 309ms respectively — five to ten times what their physical lengths would suggest.

Rerouting Patterns: How Traffic Finds Its Way

Our measurements reveal two dominant rerouting strategies that networks are adopting to cope with Red Sea cable disruptions.

Pattern 1: The Marseille Swing. Traffic from the Middle East and Gulf states that would normally transit the Red Sea to reach European landing points in Egypt (Port Said, Zafarana) is instead being routed westward across the Arabian Sea, around India, and up through the FLAG Europe-Asia cable's undamaged western segments to reach Marseille. This adds 150-200ms to journeys that should take 50-80ms. We see this pattern consistently in our Oman traceroutes — the Muscat-to-Marseille leg at 237ms is the telltale signature of this detour.

Pattern 2: The Cape Route. African traffic that would normally cross the continent and transit the Red Sea is being pushed south to Cape Town, then northward to London via the West African cable systems (WACS, SAT-3, MainOne). From London, traffic re-enters the global backbone normally. The Lagos-to-Jakarta route we measured, with its 395ms journey through seven countries and four continents, is a textbook example. Liquid Telecommunications' choice to route Lagos traffic south to Cape Town before heading to London reveals that the Red Sea corridor is considered completely unreliable for eastbound African traffic.

Both patterns share a common feature: they transform the Red Sea from a transit corridor into a wall. Traffic that used to flow through it now flows around it, adding thousands of kilometers and hundreds of milliseconds to global internet connections.

The Repair Crisis: No Ships, No Insurance, No Timeline

Under normal circumstances, a submarine cable cut can be repaired within one to three weeks. Specialized cable ships — there are fewer than 60 in the world — sail to the break point, grapple the cable from the seabed, splice it aboard, and lay it back down. It is routine work, performed hundreds of times each year across the world's oceans.

The Red Sea is no longer routine. The fundamental problem is insurance. Lloyd's of London and other marine insurers have classified large portions of the Red Sea as a war risk zone. Premiums for vessels entering Yemeni waters have skyrocketed — in some cases exceeding the value of the repair contract itself. Several insurance companies have simply stopped writing policies for Red Sea transits altogether.

Without insurance, cable ships cannot sail. Without cable ships, cables cannot be repaired. The result is a Catch-22 that has kept damaged cables offline for months — far longer than any normal repair cycle. Industry sources suggest that some cables damaged in 2024 remain unrepaired as of early 2026, with no clear timeline for restoration.

The repair challenge is compounded by the sheer number of cables affected. Even if insurance were available, the limited global fleet of cable repair ships would need to be prioritized among multiple simultaneous repairs in the same hazardous area. Each repair takes days to weeks, and a ship operating in the Red Sea would face ongoing security risks throughout the operation.

Submarine cable operators have explored alternatives: rerouting traffic to undamaged segments, increasing capacity on surviving cables, and negotiating with transit providers for backup paths. But these are band-aids on a structural wound. The Red Sea corridor was built over decades as a primary artery for Eurasian internet traffic. There is no quick substitute.

Impact on Latency: Before and After

The latency impact of Red Sea cable disruptions can be estimated by comparing our measured RTTs against the theoretical minimum based on cable length and the speed of light in fiber (approximately 200,000 km/s, or roughly 5 microseconds per kilometer).

The Muscat-to-Marseille penalty is the most revealing: 237ms for a route that should take approximately 60ms means the traffic is covering roughly four times the necessary physical distance. This is consistent with routing around the Indian subcontinent rather than through the Red Sea — adding approximately 10,000 to 15,000 kilometers to the path.

For end users, these latency increases translate into tangible degradation of internet experience. Video calls become choppy. Online gaming becomes unplayable. Cloud applications feel sluggish. Financial trading systems — which measure competitive advantage in microseconds — face existential challenges. And for the millions of people in the Middle East, East Africa, and South Asia who depend on Red Sea cables for basic internet connectivity, the impact is felt in every click, every download, every buffering video.

2Africa and the Future: Routing Around the Problem

Amid the disruption, one data point from our monitoring offers a glimmer of hope: the 2Africa cable's average RTT of just 30.9 milliseconds. Meta's 45,000-kilometer cable — the longest submarine cable ever built — was designed to circumnavigate Africa entirely, with landing points from Portugal to South Africa to Oman. Its route deliberately provides an alternative to Red Sea transit by running down the west coast of Africa and up the east coast.

The 2Africa cable began lighting up segments in 2024-2025, and our monitoring shows it is performing well. Its healthy RTT suggests that traffic using its route is not subject to the same rerouting penalties as traffic on older Red Sea cables. As more segments come online and interconnect, 2Africa could absorb some of the capacity that Red Sea cables can no longer reliably provide.

But 2Africa alone cannot replace the Red Sea corridor. The corridor carried traffic for dozens of cable systems serving three billion people across the Middle East, South Asia, East Africa, and Southeast Asia. No single cable, however ambitious, can substitute for that.

Several other projects are in development. The Blue-Raman cable (backed by Google) routes from Italy to India via Jordan and Oman, deliberately avoiding the Red Sea by crossing overland through Saudi Arabia. The India-Europe-Xpress (IEX) takes a similar approach. These cables represent a new philosophy in submarine cable design: treating the Red Sea not as a convenient corridor but as a risk to be engineered around.

The irony is that Oman — already a major cable hub with 20 submarine cables — is positioned to become even more important in this post-Red Sea routing landscape. Cables that avoid the Red Sea need alternative landing points in the Middle East, and Oman's Arabian Sea coastline offers exactly that. The Sultanate's eight landing points may soon be the primary on-ramp for Eurasian internet traffic that can no longer trust the Red Sea route.

What Our Data Proves

The internet was designed to be resilient. The ARPANET, its predecessor, was explicitly architected to survive nuclear war. Packets were supposed to find their way around damage, rerouting as needed without human intervention. And in a narrow technical sense, that promise is being kept: our traceroutes show that packets are, in fact, finding alternative paths around the Red Sea.

But resilience is not the same as performance. A packet that arrives 368 milliseconds late has still arrived — the network has not failed in the absolute sense. Yet for the users, applications, and economies that depend on that packet, the difference between 60ms and 368ms is the difference between a functioning internet connection and one that barely works. Our monitoring data demonstrates that the internet's routing system is remarkably good at finding some path, but remarkably bad at finding a good path when the obvious one is destroyed.

The Red Sea cable crisis also exposes a deeper vulnerability: geographic concentration. Seventeen percent of the world's submarine cable capacity passing through a single chokepoint was always a risk. Now that risk has materialized, and the resulting rerouting is imposing latency penalties of 100-230 milliseconds on traffic serving billions of people. The 2Africa cable and new projects like Blue-Raman are steps toward diversification, but the lesson is clear: the internet's physical infrastructure is only as resilient as its most concentrated bottleneck.

We will continue monitoring these routes as the situation evolves. Cable repairs, new cable deployments, and changes in the security environment will all be reflected in our latency measurements — because every millisecond tells a story about the physical reality beneath the digital world.

Explore the Data Yourself

All the measurements cited in this article are available through our monitoring platform. Track the cables we discussed in real time:

FLAG Europe-Asia (FEA) Cable Monitor — currently showing elevated RTT of 285ms
SEACOM/TGN-Eurasia Cable Monitor — 309ms average RTT
FALCON Cable Monitor — 231ms average RTT
IMEWE Cable Monitor — 163ms average, post-September 2025 cut
2Africa Cable Monitor — 30.9ms, healthy alternative route
Oman Country Profile — 20 cables, 8 landing points, full infrastructure map

Our monitoring runs every two hours using RIPE Atlas probes deployed worldwide, including our own probes in Minsk, Almaty, Tbilisi, and Jerusalem. Each cable is tested with both ping and traceroute measurements, and anomalies are flagged automatically when latency exceeds established baselines.