Every email, video call, financial transaction, and streaming session that crosses an ocean depends on a thin web of fiber-optic cables resting on the seabed. By some estimates, these cables carry roughly 95 percent of intercontinental internet traffic and as much as 99 percent of transoceanic digital communications. About 150 faults strike this network each year, most caused by fishing gear and ship anchors, and recent cable cuts in the Red Sea have exposed how quickly localized damage can ripple across continents.
Why submarine cable dependence demands attention right now
The tension is straightforward: nearly all cross-border digital communication rides on infrastructure that sits exposed on the ocean floor, and the rate of physical damage has not slowed. The International Cable Protection Committee reported that approximately 150 faults occur each year, mostly due to accidental human activities like fishing and anchoring. That number has held relatively steady even as global data demand has surged, meaning each individual fault now threatens a larger share of the world’s traffic.
When a cable breaks in a busy corridor, traffic reroutes to surviving cables, and those backup paths often run through the same chokepoints. Regions that have already experienced repeated faults, such as the waters off Southeast Asia and the Red Sea, face compounding risk. Each new break forces traffic onto cables that may already be running near capacity, which raises latency and increases transit costs for internet service providers and their customers. The hypothesis that regions with recent fault histories will see statistically higher latency variance and rerouting costs during periods of elevated maritime traffic is consistent with the physical constraints of the network: fewer intact cables in a corridor means less room to absorb the next disruption, regardless of whether new cables are under construction nearby.
Red Sea cable damage earlier in 2024 illustrated this dynamic in real time. Multiple cables serving traffic between Europe, the Middle East, and Asia were affected, and operators had to shift enormous volumes of data onto alternative routes. For businesses that rely on low-latency connections, such as financial trading firms, cloud service providers, and telemedicine platforms, even brief rerouting episodes translate into measurable cost increases and degraded service quality. For end users, the impacts may appear as intermittent slowdowns or degraded video quality, but for operators, they represent a stress test of how much redundancy actually exists in the current network topology.
Competing estimates and the institutions behind them
Two primary bodies have published the most widely cited figures on submarine cable traffic share, and their numbers do not perfectly align. A Congressional Research Service report states that industry experts estimate the cable network carries approximately 95 percent of intercontinental global internet traffic and 99 percent of transoceanic digital communications. The ICPC, the specialized industry body that governments and intergovernmental organizations cite for cable protection data, puts the figure higher, stating the global submarine cable network carries “more than 99% of all digital data traffic worldwide.”
The gap between 95 percent and 99 percent reflects differences in how each source defines the traffic being measured. The CRS figure refers specifically to intercontinental traffic, which excludes data that stays within a single continent but still crosses borders. The ICPC figure covers all digital data that crosses oceans, a broader category. Satellite links, which handle the remainder, serve niche applications such as remote maritime communications, polar research stations, and backup capacity for military networks. Even if satellites improve, their bandwidth and latency characteristics make them unlikely to displace seabed cables for bulk traffic in the near term.
Neither estimate has been updated with granular, real-time data from cable operators, and no public primary dataset from the FCC or private carriers shows year-to-date traffic percentages. The FCC’s circuit-status filings provide underlying capacity information used by regulators, but the most recent accessible version dates to a 2015 report cycle and has not been refreshed with post-2020 routing details in a publicly available format. That means policymakers and researchers still rely on a mix of historical regulatory data, industry disclosures, and expert judgment rather than a unified, up-to-date traffic ledger.
The European Union’s cybersecurity agency ENISA has separately documented the operational and physical risks facing this infrastructure, noting that anchoring and fishing remain the leading causes of damage. ENISA’s analysis, cited by the OECD and other bodies, reinforces the ICPC’s fault data and adds a policy dimension: governments are increasingly aware that cable protection rules vary widely between nations, and enforcement at sea remains difficult. Territorial waters, exclusive economic zones, and high seas jurisdiction all intersect with cable routes, creating a patchwork of legal obligations that can complicate both prevention and response.
Gaps in fault data and what to watch next
Despite the clear stakes, several questions remain open. No publicly accessible database tracks cable faults with granular detail, including exact locations, responsible vessels, and repair timelines, for the most recent 12 months. The ICPC’s estimate of approximately 150 annual faults is the best available benchmark, but it does not break down incidents by region, severity, or duration of service disruption. Without that level of detail, it is difficult to calculate the precise economic cost of each fault or to identify whether certain shipping lanes pose disproportionate risk.
New cable construction is underway in several regions, with tech companies like Google, Meta, and Microsoft investing in private routes. But construction timelines stretch years, and new cables often follow similar seabed paths as existing ones because geography and permitting constraints limit viable corridors. A new cable in the same trench as an older one does not necessarily reduce risk if both are exposed to the same anchoring or trawling activity. True diversification requires routing that avoids existing chokepoints, which can raise costs and trigger new environmental and regulatory reviews.
At the same time, efforts to harden the network through armoring, burial in shallow waters, and improved mapping of restricted anchoring zones have uneven coverage. Some coastal states maintain clear cable protection regimes and marked exclusion zones, while others lack the resources or political will to enforce similar standards. This inconsistency leaves operators dependent on voluntary compliance by ship captains and fishing fleets whose primary incentives are commercial, not infrastructural.
From awareness to action
The practical question now is how governments, regulators, and private operators translate rising awareness into concrete resilience measures. One obvious step is improving transparency. A shared, anonymized incident repository that records the time, approximate location, cause, and service impact of each fault would sharpen risk modeling without necessarily exposing commercially sensitive details. Even coarse regional breakdowns could help identify hotspots where additional routing diversity or stricter anchoring rules would yield the greatest benefit.
Another avenue is targeted redundancy. Rather than simply adding capacity along the busiest existing routes, planners could prioritize alternative paths that bypass known chokepoints, even if those routes are longer or more expensive. For critical applications-financial markets, emergency communications, and essential government services-dedicated backup paths that avoid single points of failure may be justified as a form of infrastructure insurance.
Finally, maritime governance will matter as much as engineering. Cable operators cannot unilaterally police shipping lanes, and navies cannot escort every fishing vessel. But clearer rules of the road, better charting of cable zones, and routine outreach to maritime industries can reduce accidental damage. As the volume of digital traffic continues to climb, the cost of inaction will be measured not only in repair bills but in the cumulative drag of latency spikes, rerouting expenses, and trust lost when the supposedly seamless internet proves to be anything but.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
