The Most Vulnerable Place On The Internet

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Why Egypt became one of the biggest chokepoints for Internet cables:

The Asia-Africa-Europe-1 Internet cable travels 15,500 miles along the seafloor, connecting Hong Kong to Marseille, France. As it snakes through the South China Sea and toward Europe, the cable helps provide Internet connections to more than a dozen countries, from India to Greece. When the cable was cut on June 7, millions of people were plunged offline and faced temporary Internet blackouts.

[...] Sixteen of these submarine cables-which are often no thicker than a hosepipe and are vulnerable to damage from ships' anchors and earthquakes-pass 1,200 miles through the Red Sea before they hop over land in Egypt and get to the Mediterranean Sea, connecting Europe to Asia. The last two decades have seen the route emerge as one of the world's largest Internet chokepoints and, arguably, the Internet's most vulnerable place on Earth. (The region, which also includes the Suez Canal, is also a global choke point for shipping and the movement of goods. Chaos ensued when the container ship Ever Given got wedged in the canal in 2021.)

Where there are chokepoints, there are single points of failure," Nicole Starosielski, an associate professor of media, culture, and communication at New York University and an author on submarine cables, said. Because it's a site of intense concentration of global movement, that does make it more vulnerable than many places around the world."

[...] Look at Egypt on a map of the world's subsea Internet cables and it immediately becomes clear why Internet experts have been concerned about the area for years. The 16 cables in the area are concentrated through the Red Sea and touch land in Egypt, where they make a 100-mile journey across the country to reach the Mediterranean Sea. (Cable maps don't show the exact locations of cables.)

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