More Red Sea cable delays may affect internet speeds in UAE

DELAYS ON GOOGLE, META CABLES SHOW HOW FRAGILE INTERNET LINKS CAN BE

- BY JUSTIN VARGHESE

Most of the world’s internet traffic — nearly 95 per cent of global data — moves through thin fibre-optic cables lying on the seabed.

When disruptions affect those routes, speeds drop worldwide, including in highly connected markets like the UAE.

That’s why the latest Bloomberg report on Google and Meta delaying their Red Sea subsea cable projects has raised fresh concerns. The setbacks follow earlier outages in the same region that temporarily slowed traffic across the Middle East.

Those events highlighted how fragile the Red Sea corridor has become — a route that handles roughly 17 per cent of global internet traffic linking Europe, Asia and Africa.

Meta’s 2Africa cable and Google’s Blue-Raman system were both engineered to pass through this corridor, the fastest digital bridge between continents. Together, the systems were expected to boost bandwidth resilience and ease congestion for millions of users, including those in the UAE.

Why the Red Sea delays matter