In February 2024, a drifting, missile-hit cargo ship accidentally did what Iran now threatens to do on purpose. The internet survived — barely. Repairs took five months, politics nearly broke the fix, and the whole world got a free preview of the next war’s most dangerous front.
Prologue: A Ship With Its Anchor Down
On February 18, 2024, the Rubymar, a Belize-flagged cargo vessel loaded with 41,000 tons of fertilizer, was hit by Houthi ballistic missiles off the western coast of Yemen. The crew abandoned ship — dropping an anchor as they fled — and the 172-meter vessel drifted, unmanned, through some of the most densely cabled seabed on earth. Six days later, three of the world’s most important fibre-optic cables went dark within minutes of each other.
Nobody planned it. That is precisely the lesson.
The severed lines — Seacom, AAE-1, and the Europe India Gateway — carried roughly 25 percent of the traffic flowing through the Red Sea, the corridor that TeleGeography’s Tim Stronge estimates handles “over 90% of communications between Europe and Asia.”
Internet monitors at Kentik watched the failure propagate in real time: two distinct disruption clusters, five minutes apart — Seacom failing at 09:46 UTC, AAE-1 at 09:51 — with outages rippling from Djibouti to Kenya to Vietnam.
Cloudflare and Microsoft rerouted. The world kept scrolling.
Then came the part nobody planned for: fixing it took five months.
The Repair Is the Weapon
Here is the uncomfortable discovery of 2024, and it explains everything about Iran’s current threat. The cable itself is the easy target. The repair is the hard part — and that is where the real vulnerability lives.
Within weeks of the February cuts, the three cable consortia ran into a wall that had nothing to do with engineering. Yemen’s internationally recognized government refused to grant a repair permit for AAE-1 — because the cable’s consortium included TeleYemen, the national telecom company split in two by civil war, one branch operating from Houthi-controlled Sana’a. The government in Aden suspected consortium members of “indirectly funding terrorism” and opened a probe before it would let a single repair ship sail.
The Houthis, meanwhile, insisted that only they could authorize work in the waters they controlled — and that cable ships would need a permit, “out of concern for (the ships’) safety.”
Read that again. Two rival governments, each claiming the sole right to permit the repair, each with leverage to delay it, in waters where armed drones patrolled overhead. The ransom was not money — it was permission. And permission, in a war zone, is a currency Iran understands perfectly.
The outages stretched on. AAE-1 was not fully repaired until April 2025 — after being cut again in December 2024, a wound that took four more months to close.
Insurance costs for Red Sea shipping spiked so sharply that the Lloyd’s Market Association publicly warned underwriters to reconsider transits entirely.
New cable projects through the corridor — 2Africa, Africa-1, IEX — went into indefinite delay, forcing investors to abandon stakes.
Total kills: zero. Total ships sunk by the Houthis to achieve all this: one, the Rubymar, sunk accidentally by its own drifting anchor.
The Curriculum
Now place this beside what two senior Iranian officials told Reuters this week. Tehran has drawn up detailed plans to strike Gulf undersea cables if the US and Israel attack again. It would try to block the repairs, so outages last longer. “There will be no more red lines … from undersea cables to military bases, including covert ones.”
Every clause of that threat maps onto a lesson from the Red Sea:
- “Strike the cables” — the Rubymar proved you don’t even need intent; the cables are fragile, shallow, and mapped. State actors with naval assets could do it surgically, repeatedly.
- “Block the repairs” — the five-month AAE-1 outage proved that permits, politics, and insurance do half the damage for you. As one industry executive noted, cable ship operators are “wary of working in dangerous waters and dealing with a group designated as terrorists.” Multiply that wariness across an active Iran-US shooting war, and “weeks of outage” becomes the optimistic case.
- “Hold Washington responsible” — the second official’s warning that Gulf states should blame Washington, not Tehran, for cable damage is a page from the Houthi playbook: the permit requirement in Yemeni waters was never about safety. It was leverage.
The Houthis ran this playbook with one sinking ship and a permit office. Iran is contemplating it with a navy, Revolutionary Guard fast-attack craft, mines, and regional proxies on both sides of the Arabian Peninsula. And the target set is richer: during the March war, Iranian strikes already hit two Amazon Web Services facilities in the UAE.
The data centres are no longer theoretical targets. They are confirmed ones.
Why the Red Sea Matters More Than Hormuz — and Why Iran Isn’t Saying So
The sharpest detail in the current reporting is an absence. Analysts note that the Red Sea — which carries about 10 percent of inter-regional traffic — would be the far more consequential target than Hormuz, where under 1 percent of international bandwidth flows.
Tehran has threatened seven Hormuz cables loudly and publicly, while saying nothing about the Red Sea.
That silence is strategic. The Red Sea is where the world has already absorbed one shock — where insurers have repriced, where consortia have learned the permit game, where the precedent of months-long outages has been established. Threatening it openly would trigger immediate hardening: rerouting, satellite augmentation, accelerated land corridors. Keeping it unspoken preserves it as the second strike — the escalation rung Iran climbs if the first doesn’t produce capitulation.
This is deterrence architecture, not war planning. As Alex Vatanka of the Middle East Institute observes, Tehran wants Gulf states and corporate executives to “press Trump over the risks his policies pose to their investment plans.”
The Gulf’s data centre boom — tens of billions in UAE and Saudi AI and cloud infrastructure — was built on an assumption that the seabed was demilitarized. Iran’s threat doesn’t need to be executed to work. It only needs to be believed by the people writing the next investment memo in Riyadh.
The Nightmare Scenario, Priced In
So what does a deliberate campaign look like, in the market’s language?
Not a global internet blackout — the architecture is too redundant for that, and even simultaneous cuts in the Gulf would degrade rather than destroy.
The realistic scenario is uglier: weeks of degraded connectivity to the world’s fastest-growing financial hub during an active shooting war. Payment systems stuttering. Cloud regions failing over at the worst possible moment. Oil trading — already electronic and latency-sensitive — repricing conflict risk in real time with thin, rerouted bandwidth. War-risk insurance for cable ships effectively unavailable, meaning no repair timeline at all.
Sri Lanka’s post-crisis IMF program has already been paused for missed transparency targets. The Gulf’s version of that crisis wouldn’t need a missed payment — just a missed connection.
The Rubymar taught every military planner on earth the arithmetic: one ship, one anchor, five months. Tehran watched that arithmetic work — work accidentally — and has now told the world, through anonymous officials and named Revolutionary Guard commanders, that it has done the math on purpose.
The dress rehearsal closed in July 2024. The play has not yet opened. But the stage — fifteen cables through Bab el-Mandeb, twenty through the Red Sea, the densest digital seabed on the planet
— is set, lit, and waiting.
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