Red Sea Cable Cuts Disrupt Internet across Asia and the Middle East

Reuters

10:50 JST, September 8, 2025

Sept 7 (Reuters) – Internet connectivity in multiple countries including India and Pakistan has been affected due to subsea cable outages in the Red Sea, internet monitoring group Netblocks said.

Similar internet disruptions were also observed on Etilasat and Du networks in the United Arab Emirates, Netblocks said.

It was not immediately clear who was responsible for the damage but Netblocks identified failures affecting cable systems near Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Microsoft MSFT.O on Saturday said that its Microsoft Azure users may experience increased latency due to multiple undersea fiber cuts in the Red Sea.

The company said its users may experience service disruptions on traffic routes through the Middle East. Azure, the world’s second largest cloud provider after Amazon’s AMZN.O AWS, has rerouted traffic through alternative network paths and network traffic is not interrupted.

“We do expect higher latency on some traffic that previously traversed through the Middle East. Network traffic that does not traverse through the Middle East is not impacted,” Microsoft said.