Cable cuts in Egypt knock out connectivity across three continents
Just after 1200 UTC on Tuesday, June 7, the Africa-Asia-Europe-1 (AAE-1) and SEA-ME-WE-5 (SMW-5) submarine cables were cut, reportedly in Egypt. The damage disrupted Internet access for millions of users across the Middle East, Africa, and as far away as Asia. Cloud providers including Google Cloud Platform and OVHcloud also reported connectivity problems stemming from the cuts.
Data from Cloudflare Radar showed sharp traffic drops in the affected countries as the damage occurred, with recovery beginning roughly four hours later as repairs were completed. Saudi Arabia appeared to be affected as well, though the impact there was lighter and traffic rebounded almost immediately.
Why the damage reached far beyond the cable landings
Not every country connected to AAE-1 or SMW-5 saw the same effect. The degree of disruption depended on how much redundant connectivity a country had in place, and on where it sat relative to the cut. Countries relying solely on the damaged cables for global Internet access felt the outage most acutely.
Ethiopia, though landlocked and lacking submarine cable landing points, was among the impacted countries. Fiber routes from Ethiopia connect into Somalia, which experienced disruption. Ethio Telecom also routes traffic through providers in Kenya and Djibouti; Djibouti Telecom peers with larger global carriers such as Telecom Italia (TI) Sparkle, one of SMW5's owners. That chain of dependencies explains how a cut in Egypt could ripple into a landlocked nation.
The two cables both land at Abu Talat and Zafarana in Egypt, sites that also serve a number of other submarine cables. Egypt functions as a choke point for international connectivity: roughly 15 terrestrial crossing routes traverse the country, according to a 2021 Middle East Eye report, and telecom research firm TeleGeography notes that the Egypt route is favored for Europe-Middle East-India links because it involves the least amount of land to cross. As a result, locally damaged infrastructure can affect users thousands of miles away.
Cloud provider impact
Google Cloud documented the cascading effects in its incident report, noting increased packet loss for egress traffic to the Middle East and elevated latency between its Europe and Asia regions for 3 hours and 12 minutes. The root cause was attributed to capacity shortages following two simultaneous fiber cuts, affecting products including Cloud NAT, Hybrid Connectivity, and Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).
OVHcloud reported that backbone links between Marseille and Singapore were down, with its network operations teams determining the fault was related to partner fiber cuts.
Repair speed points to a land-based fault
Traffic returned to normal within hours, an unusually fast recovery for submarine cable damage. Repair work on undersea cables typically takes days or weeks, as crews must locate the fault, dispatch repair ships, and retrieve and splice the cable. The rapid restoration here suggests the damage occurred on land, after the cables came ashore. Telecommunications authorities in Pakistan and Oman confirmed via Twitter that services had been restored in their countries.
Mitigating the ripple effect
An interconnected network means a single cable cut can have widespread consequences, degrading performance or blocking access for users far from the incident, and creating problems within the infrastructure of application providers themselves.
For network operators, the impact can be reduced through multiple upstream providers and peers, and through diverse physical paths for critical infrastructure. Cloudflare's own approach involves deploying in data centers close to end users to keep traffic local. Because a customer origin may be reachable from some networks but not others during a disruption, Cloudflare introduced Orpheus in September 2021, which identifies unreachable paths in real time and routes traffic away from them so origins remain reachable regardless of network conditions. For content and application providers, such measures help maintain availability and performance even when the underlying Internet infrastructure is compromised.
