Underwater internet cables in Red Sea reportedly damaged

misk@sopuli.xyz to Technology@lemmy.world – 171 points –
Underwater internet cables in Red Sea reportedly damaged
theregister.com
44

There's only one country who has been running around doing this the past two decades. They've been confirmed to be in these areas, AND they have the capability.

Ladies and Gentlemen...RUSSIA!

You sad ass pieces of shit.

To be honest I'd be surprised if this was Russia. It's certainly not outside of Russia's capabilities, but at the end of the day they're just cables. Plenty of the Red Sea is right next to Houthi-controlled territory and not all that deep. Something like this is commercially available and easily capable of reaching the floor of the area near the Bab el-Mandeb that any cables from Europe to East Asia have to go through

I mean depending on how deep they are they wouldn't even really need that. I imagine you could just drop an anchor and drag it.

Can't you just drop a small anchor (on a decently large ship) and drag it along the sea floor? This type of attack doesn't submarines.

Yes, in fact, that's what happened last time the whole Arab peninsula was knocked off the Internet.

Is there additional reading I can do on the topic? I've googled but found nothing but concerns from Nato officials that Russia could engage in seabed sabotage. This comment is universally praised so I guess it's some universal knowledge I missed. What are some instances when they did it?

Near the beginning of the Ukraine War, someone damaged an underwater pipeline. It was from Russia but Russia couldn’t use it because of sanctions. I don’t recall any one figuring out who it was, so everyone blamed Russia, except those blaming Ukraine , or somehow there was a reason for US

Why would Russian government need to do this kind of thing? You should separate their PR part (which is destructive and incompetent) and things actually done.

Why would they do 90% of the idiotic shit they do?

One can imagine lots of reasons, confidently name none, which probably is the goal.

First lie wins then after that the most interesting one

So if you do something wrong say you did something else worse and make every spend their time fighting that first story

You mean, like that time they blew up their own pipeline? Oh wait....

I had the same thing happen to my internet cables but it was the cat.

I've had it with these god damned sharks attacking my god damned internet cables

What’s funny is, sharks legitimately attack these kinds of cables regularly. They need to be adequately shielded to prevent shark attacks.

As they say, you're more likely to get struck by lightning than attacked by a shark(unless you're an Internet cable)

Feels weird too say that my wifi is being shit cause of sharks but its true!

Why not just bury them?

Environmentalists don't like it when you bury too many sharks.

This caught me off guard. I'm lucky I wasn't drinking anything.

Because it's one thing to cruise along with a ship and just unspool some cable into the water but a whole other thing to dig hundreds of miles of trenches deep under water.

This is the best summary I could come up with:


At least 15 submarine cables pass through the Bab al-Mandab Strait at the southern end of the Red Sea, a body of water just 26km wide at some points.

"The location of the cable break is significant due to its geopolitical sensitivity and ongoing tensions, making it a challenging environment for maintenance and repair operations," Seacom said.

Globes attributed the outages to the Iran-backed Houthis, and alleged the damage was "significant, but not critical," because several other undersea cables serve the region.

Peripheral vendor Logitech recently warned its supply chain would experience delays as a result of the Red Sea conflict.

While it's not clear what's exactly going on with subsea internet cables in the Red Sea right now, pinning blame on the Houthis isn't entirely out of left field - the Yemeni rebels threatened to damage comms infrastructure late in 2023.

Rear Admiral John Gower, a former Royal Navy submarine commander, told the BBC earlier this month that it would take a more sophisticated force than the Houthis, someone with submersibles capable of locating the cables to do the deed.


The original article contains 667 words, the summary contains 181 words. Saved 73%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!