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Microsoft recently issued a notice through Microsoft Azure reporting a disruption in submarine cables near Jeddah, Saudi Arabia — an outage that has impacted multiple Microsoft cloud services and caused significant network latency.
The incident occurred on September 6, 2025, at 06:00 UTC, with confirmed disruptions to several key submarine cables, including SMW4 (Southeast Asia–Middle East–Western Europe 4), IMEWE (India–Middle East–Western Europe), FALCON GCX (Southeast Asia–India–Middle East), and the Europe–India Gateway.
According to the International Cable Protection Committee (ICPC), nearly 15 submarine cables pass through the narrow Bab el-Mandeb Strait. Because the waters are shallow, these cables are highly vulnerable to maritime incidents. Thus far, four cables have been confirmed as damaged, though the list may expand as investigations continue.
In response, Microsoft swiftly rerouted traffic that normally flowed through the compromised cables onto alternative routes. However, due to capacity limitations and routing constraints of those paths, overall latency has spiked sharply.
NetBlocks, a network monitoring group, observed reduced speeds and even connectivity disruptions across multiple countries. Meanwhile, Cloudflare reported a 20% drop in traffic between Delhi and London and a 30% drop between Mumbai and Frankfurt.
The most critical link affected is SMW4, an 18,800-kilometer submarine cable stretching from Singapore to France, which carries an immense portion of internet traffic between Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. The full scale of its disruption remains difficult to estimate.
Unlike the earlier Red Sea cable incidents, this outage does not appear to be the result of deliberate sabotage. Preliminary investigations suggest that the damage was likely caused by a merchant vessel, whose anchor may have dragged across the seabed and severed the cables.
Repair efforts are expected to take considerable time, as the affected zone is complicated by the presence of armed conflict, making operations riskier. Microsoft has stated that a full restoration of these submarine cables and normal traffic flow could take several months.
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