Yemen’s internet drops to near zero after airstrikes hit cable landing station
Yemen experienced a nationwide internet outage in the early hours of Friday, January 21, 2022, following reports of airstrikes in the country. Local and global news outlets linked the disruption to an attack on a telecommunications facility in Al-Hudaydah, where the FALCON undersea cable makes landfall.
Data from Cloudflare Radar shows traffic falling to near zero between 21:30 UTC on January 20 and 22:00 UTC (01:00 local time). The outage effectively took down the main state-owned operator, Public Telecommunication Corporation (AS30873), which carries nearly all of Yemen’s internet traffic.
BGP updates confirm loss of routing
Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) updates from Yemen’s ASNs show a sharp spike at approximately 21:55 UTC on January 20, coinciding with the impact on the country’s primary ASN. These update messages indicate that Yemen’s main network was no longer routable — a pattern similar to that observed during outages in The Gambia and Kazakhstan, though for fundamentally different causes in each case.
2022’s pattern of disruption
The year has already seen several major internet outages for distinct reasons:
- The Gambia — a cable fault cut connectivity.
- Kazakhstan — an internet shutdown tied to civil unrest.
- Burkina Faso — a mobile internet shutdown following an attempted coup.
- Tonga — an outage caused by a volcanic eruption, which was still ongoing at the time of writing.
Cloudflare Radar continues to track the situation in Yemen as it develops.
