Published by Global Banking & Finance Review®
Posted on September 6, 2025
2 min readLast updated: January 22, 2026
Add as preferred source on GoogleRed Sea cable cuts disrupt internet in Asia and the Middle East, affecting Microsoft Azure services and causing increased latency.
(Reuters) - Internet connectivity in multiple countries including India and Pakistan has been affected due to subsea cable outages in the Red Sea, internet monitoring group Netblocks said.
Similar internet disruptions were also observed on Etilasat and Du networks in the United Arab Emirates, Netblocks said.
It was not immediately clear who was responsible for the damage but Netblocks identified failures affecting cable systems near Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
Microsoft on Saturday said that its Microsoft Azure users may experience increased latency due to multiple undersea fiber cuts in the Red Sea.
The company said its users may experience service disruptions on traffic routes through the Middle East. Azure, the world's second largest cloud provider after Amazon's AWS, has rerouted traffic through alternative network paths and network traffic is not interrupted.
"We do expect higher latency on some traffic that previously traversed through the Middle East. Network traffic that does not traverse through the Middle East is not impacted," Microsoft said.
(Reporting by Harshita Meenaktshi and Shivani Tanna in Bengaluru, Editing by Franklin Paul and Christina Fincher)
Internet connectivity refers to the ability of devices to connect to the internet, allowing them to send and receive data. It is essential for accessing online services and applications.
A subsea cable is a type of cable laid on the seabed to carry telecommunications signals across oceans. These cables are crucial for global internet connectivity.
Cloud computing is the delivery of computing services over the internet, allowing users to access and store data on remote servers rather than local machines.
Latency is the time it takes for data to travel from one point to another in a network. High latency can lead to delays in communication and data transfer.
A network provider is a company that provides internet access and telecommunications services to customers, enabling them to connect to the internet and communicate.
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