Houthis knock out underwater cables linking Europe to Asia | Hacker News Reader

Houthis knock out underwater cables linking Europe to Asia

jpost.com

63 points015UUZn8aEvW47 comments

Hard to find good sources on this.

Guardian article (Feb 5, 2024), "Houthi-linked Telegram channel published a map of the cables running along the bed of the Red Sea. The image was accompanied by a message: “There are maps of international cables connecting all regions of the world through the sea. It seems that Yemen is in a strategic location, as internet lines that connect entire continents – not only countries – pass near it.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/05/houthis-may-sa...

MEMRI publishes word for word quote of above with screenshots of Telegram group (Dec 24, 2023).

https://www.memri.org/jttm/veiled-threat-telegram-channels-l...

Today (Feb 26, 2024) @Netblocks posts screenshot of drop in traffic.

https://twitter.com/netblocks/status/1762115571376685524

Sunil Tagare - Founder & CEO, OpenCables (Feb 25, 2024)

How can these be repaired? Can it even be done safely? Insurance of operating a specialized boat in these waters? (paraphrasing)

https://twitter.com/tagaresunil/status/1761859936617959443

- "How can these be repaired? Can it even be done safely? Insurance of operating a specialized boat in these waters? (paraphrasing)"

- "[Flag Telecom founder and telecoms entrepreneur Sunil Tagare] also posted that no cable ship provider was willing to provide repairs in the area and that insurance companies would cancel policies for cable ships attempting to operate in Yemeni waters. Again, DCD hasn’t been able to confirm these claims."

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/at-least-one-subs...

After watching a pirate vs coalition documentary, you can imagine the cartoonish dollar signs in the eyes of the insurance for piracy industry. Only one person would speak on camera. Loosely quoted “we increased our profits by 35% this year after insuring ships in the gulf of Aden.” Interviewer what would happen if the pirates stopped >> “we would not be very happy about it”.

It costs about 20k per ship for insurance. Armed/unarmed militia onboard security is quite expensive though and they didn’t quote a price. I’m sure they can work it out with the coalition, insurance, and workmen for all the risks involved.

I don’t know if anyone here realizes how valuable these cables are. Satellite time is incredibly expensive. Using other undersea cable routes is bad because now you are in a situation where bandwidth limitations may come into play but mainly lack of alternatives if those remaining cables have issues. I wouldn’t say it’s common to have issues but it is not uncommon.

last quote of the documentary per pirate leader “we are considering going back to the old ways of cutting throats”.

Related yesterday:

Submarine cables cut in the Red Sea.Authorities looking at potential terrorism

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39506931

Terrorism is an interesting word choice in this context.

It clearly counts as terrorism if it's intentional damage to key international infrastructure by a non-state actor for political purposes.

(while the Houthis control much of Yemen, they are not its internationally recognized government)

That's leaning pretty hard on the technicality of who has the UN chair, with the detail that it's effectively us (NATO) vetoing their recognition.

Not that I'm cool with the cable cuts, but "rogue state" would be more fair imo.

I'm not entirely clear why state acts can't be called "terrorism"; examples would include the Libyan Lockerbie bombing, the French bombing of the Rainbow Warrior, and the Russian Salisbury poisoning incident.

That's fair as long as we're consistent, personally I always prick my ears at "terrorism" after seeing it politicized for most of my adult life.

I was more focused on the "terror" part. I would guess there's some line where a destructive act transitions from "attack" or "vandalism" to "terror".

The UK terror legislation (which is .. not great) defines it as "for a political purpose". Which is actually a reasonable distinction vs regular crime.

Seeing no effect in SEA, are there any reports/dashboards that visualize the state of the global internet connectivity?

There used to be a few better ones, but for now there is 1keyes. [1]

[1] - https://www.thousandeyes.com/outages/

This should provoke swift, hard, and overwhelming reactions from G7 countries. The undersea cables have to be inviolate or we'll see this happen all the time, with major negative impacts to internet stability and effective international commerce.

Yeah like maybe forcing a cease fire like the entire world expect the US and Israel want.

We are losing allies in the world with our constant vetoing in the UNSC.

The only de-escalatory move right now is to do both - step on Israel hard to show that it's not about that, and step on Yemen harder to show that Thou Shalt Not Fuck With This Particular Thing As Activism.

Our support for this genocide puts the rest of the world in an impossible place and we shouldn't expect traditional international norms to remain unbroken if we're going through with it.

Or they could build resilience because shit happens

Four underwater communications cables between Saudi Arabia and Djibouti have been struck out of commission in recent months...

Most of the immediate harm will be absorbed by the Gulf states and India, Globes said.

This is in the Middle East and may or may not be related to the war in Gaza.

I'm like the worst possible person to do this because I tend to not follow The News and I expect someone to get very upset with me for it. But I will say the world needs peace in the Middle East more than I understood. There is -- or was -- critical infrastructure running through there and this is potentially a big deal globally.

And that does not mean I am advocating some kind of intervention from other countries. Please don't put words in my mouth in that regard. I'm just saying the ongoing issues there are apparently now becoming a global problem in ways that likely most people would not have predicted.

Explains why my Netherlands NZB^h^h^h Usenet server access from Singapore in on the fritz

Without internet we can go back to the bronze age quite fast.

Back to the dark days of the 1980s.

80's?

I can't see why the internet would reset us to the the bronze age. I think what they're saying is it's more likely to reset us to similar state to when the internet wasn't common-place, ie, the 80s.

I should've clarified - my memory is that even in the 80s the 'internet' wasn't that fundamentally-critical to typical daily behaviour. Heck, even the WWW took a while to roll into relevance.

Not a chance, the changes wrought by the industrial revolution would not be undone so easily. Removing the internet from society would not change what people already know how to do and what is possible to do; other methods of exchanging that knowledge (schools/books/etc) would be rapidly re-emphasized. It might even cause a reversal of the compency crisis as people wouldn't have the rest of the internet to distract them from their studies...

Realistically however, attacking some undersea cables isn't a threat to the existence of the internet anyway. Even if you could split THE internet into many national/regional networks, that would still be sufficient for most industrial and economic needs. More expensive and robust links could connect these regional networks where truly needed.

> Even if you could split THE internet into many national/regional networks, that would still be sufficient for most industrial and economic needs.

This is not the specific case, but I think that if Europe lost access to US internet services its economy would collapse.

The US is special in being able to build and sustain huge tech companies. But the most important (internet or otherwise) services for anyones' economy don't require such huge companies.

Not saying that the loss worldwide free communication wouldn't be painful, but I think it would be as painful for both the providers and the consumers of services.

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