The internet is a garden hose on the sea floor
The Red Sea is a chokepoint for the internet again, and the ships that fix broken cables are few and getting old. A Verge story about one of those ships is the best way in.
Almost everything you do online leaves the country through a cable about as thick as a garden hose. There are about 1.3 million km of them on the sea floor (enough to go round the Earth 32 times), in nearly 600 systems, according to TeleGeography figures quoted by The Verge.
Nobody thinks about them until one breaks. I like the stories about them, because the cloud turns out to be ships, weather, permits and about a thousand people at sea.
The Red Sea, again
More than 90% of the data capacity between Europe and Asia runs under the Red Sea. Almost all of it goes through Bab al-Mandab, a strait less than 32 km wide between Yemen on one side and Djibouti and Eritrea on the other. In September, the Houthis took Yemen’s side of it (Rest of World; Saudi-backed forces said on 5 October they’d retaken some of it, which the Houthis deny).
- Red Sea cables, the main route
- Land route across Iraq and Turkey
- Yemen. The Houthis took its side of the strait in September
- 1
- Bab al-Mandab, under 32 km wide
- 2
- Suez
- 3
- Al-Faw, where the route across Iraq starts
As far as I know, no cable has been cut there this time. The problem is the repair: in 2024, three Red Sea cables were damaged and fixing them took months, because the ships needed permits and some assurance they wouldn’t be fired upon. So the cloud companies are paying for land routes. According to a source quoted by Rest of World, Google paid two to three times the roughly €6 million that newer lines across Turkey are expected to cost, for fibre strands along Turkish state pipelines. Google and Meta have also started sending some live traffic across Iraq.
The rest of the year has been busy too:
| When (2026) | Where | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| 2 Oct | Philippines to Singapore | A cable cut slowed the internet across the Philippines. Repairs were expected to take several weeks (Newsbytes.PH) |
| Aug | Perth | Two cables faulted one after the other inside the protection zone. The owner, Subco, asked the federal police to investigate (ABC) |
| May | Strait of Hormuz | Iranian officials floated charging fees on the cables under the strait and handing their repair to Iranian firms (Scientific American) |
| Apr | Matsu, Taiwan | The cable between Beigan and Dongyin was cut for the third time in four years (The Diplomat) |
The ships that fix it
Between 150 and 200 cables break every year, mostly because of fishing gear and anchors. About 60 ships in the world can lay or repair them, and fewer than 20 do only repairs (Scientific American).
60 ships, 20 highlighted.
The fleet is old, and a TeleGeography study found nearly two thirds of the maintenance ships will be near the end of their service life by 2040. Some of the recent additions are second-hand oil and gas ships, converted.
The story to read
The Verge story I keep coming back to is about one of those ships, KDDI’s Ocean Link. On 11 March 2011, it was repairing a cable about 30 km off Japan’s Pacific coast when the earthquake hit. Then the crew went to work on what the tsunami had broken, one repair 6,200 m down. Josh Dzieza tells it much better than I can.
It’s the best thing I’ve read on how the internet actually stays up, and it’s lovely to look at. Kristen Radtke’s sketches of the ship turn into video, and Go Takayama’s photos take you onto the foredeck, down to the cable tanks and into the galley. Give it a big screen and some time.
Read these instead
- The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet afloat, Josh Dzieza, The Verge, 2024. The Ocean Link story and the people on the repair ships. If you only read one, read this one.
- Conflict in the Red Sea is forcing cloud giants to find a new route for the internet, Indranil Ghosh, Rest of World, October 2026. Who’s buying which land route, and for how much.
- Iran’s cable threats expose the aging fleet that fixes the Internet, Ramin Skibba, Scientific American, May 2026. The repair fleet in numbers, short.
- Mother Earth Mother Board, Neal Stephenson, Wired, 1996. Laying the FLAG cable around the world. It’s 42,535 words (Nieman Storyboard counted), so maybe keep it for a long flight.