Hong Kong-based HGC Global Communications has announced that four of its undersea telecommunications cables have been cut at the bottom of the Red Sea, impacting approximately 25% of traffic.
The company is taking steps to reroute traffic globally and redistribute it across the 11 remaining active cables in the Red Sea to mitigate the damage.
It remains uncertain how this incident might affect Israeli internet providers, as noted by The Times of Israel.
The Bab al-Mandab Strait, which separates the Red Sea from the Indian Ocean's Gulf of Aden, serves as a critical conduit not only for maritime trade between Asia and Europe but also for internet connectivity across Europe, Asia, and Africa.
Approximately two dozen internet cables are laid along its seabed, with at least one, owned by Seacom, experiencing a failure on Saturday, February 24.
Seacom stated that a segment of its East African cable system, traversing the Red Sea, went offline on that day, impacting internet traffic between Africa and Europe.
Reports at the end of February indicated that cables from TGN, AAE-1, and EIG were also affected.
It's worth noting that up to 200 unintentional damages to undersea internet cables occur worldwide each year due to natural disasters and shipping activities.
However, the Bab al-Mandab Strait bottleneck is under the control of Houthi rebels in Yemen, raising concerns that deliberate damage to the cables may be orchestrated by them.
