Iran warned last week that undersea cables in the Strait of Hormuz were a vulnerable point for the region’s digital economy, raising concerns about potential attacks on critical infrastructure.
Already a choke point for global oil shipments, the narrow waterway is just as crucial to the digital world. Several fiber optic cables snake across the strait’s seabed and connect countries from India and Southeast Asia to Europe via the Gulf States and Egypt.
What makes submarine cables important?
Submarine cables are fiber optic or electrical cables laid on the seabed to transmit data and power. They carry about 99% of the world’s Internet traffic, according to the ITU, the United Nations’ specialized agency for digital technologies.
They also transport telecommunications and electricity between countries and are essential for cloud services and online communication.
“Damaged cables mean Internet slowdowns or outages, e-commerce disruptions, delayed financial transactions … and economic fallout from all these disruptions,” geopolitical and energy analyst Masha Kotkin said.
Gulf countries, particularly the UAE and Saudi Arabia, have invested billions of dollars in artificial intelligence and digital infrastructure to diversify their economies away from oil. Both nations have established national AI companies that serve clients across the region — all relying on undersea cables to move data at lightning speed.
Major cables through the Strait of Hormuz include Asia-Africa-Europe 1 (AAE-1), connecting Southeast Asia to Europe via Egypt, with landing points in the UAE, Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia; the FALCON network connecting India and Sri Lanka with the Gulf countries, Sudan and Egypt; and the Gulf Bridge International Cable System connecting all the Gulf countries including Iran.
Additional networks are under construction, including a system led by Qatar’s Ooredoo.
What area are the risks?
While the total length of submarine cables has grown significantly between 2014 and 2025, failures have remained stable at around 150-200 incidents per year, according to the International Cable Protection Committee (ICPC).
State-sponsored sabotage remains a risk, but 70-80% of failures are caused by inadvertent human activities – primarily fishing and ship anchoring, according to the ICPC and experts.
Other risks include undersea currents, earthquakes, undersea volcanoes and typhoons, said Alan Mauldin, director of research at telecommunications research firm TeleGeography. The industry is addressing these by burying cables, armoring them and choosing safe routes, he said.
The US-Israel war against Iran, approaching the two-month mark, has brought unprecedented disruption to global energy supplies and regional infrastructure, including hits to Amazon Web Services data centers in Bahrain and the UAE. Submarine cables have been spared for now.
However, there is an indirect risk of damaged vessels inadvertently hitting cables by pulling anchors.
“In a situation of active military operations, the risk of unintended harm increases, and the longer this conflict lasts, the greater the likelihood of unintended harm,” Kotkin said. A similar incident occurred in 2024 when a commercial vessel attacked by Iran-aligned Houthis drifted in the Red Sea and severed cables with its anchor.
The degree to which damage to the cables could affect connectivity in the Gulf depends largely on how much individual network operators rely on them and what alternatives they have, according to TeleGeography.
No easy solution
Repairing damaged cables in conflict zones poses a separate challenge to securing them. While the physical repair itself is not overly complicated, decisions by repair vessel owners and insurers can also be influenced by the risk of damage from combat or the presence of mines, experts say.
Permits to enter territorial waters add another layer of difficulty. “Often, one of the biggest problems with doing repairs is you have to get permits into the waters where the damage is. That can sometimes take a long time and can be the biggest source (of problems),” Mauldin said.
When the conflict ends, industry players will also face the challenge of resurveying the seabed to determine safe cable positions and avoid ships or objects that may have sunk during hostilities, he said.
What alternatives are there if submarine cables falter?
While potential damage to undersea cables would not cause a complete loss of connectivity – due to land-based links – experts agree that satellite systems are not a viable replacement, as they cannot handle the same amount of traffic and are more expensive.
“It’s not like you can just switch to satellite. It’s not an alternative,” Mauldin said, noting that satellites rely on connections to land-based networks and are better suited for things in motion, like airplanes and ships.
Low-Earth circuit networks such as Starlink are “a boutique solution that is not scalable to millions of users at this time,” Kotkin added.
