Undersea Cables
The fiber-optic lines on the seabed that carry nearly all intercontinental data, concentrated on a handful of routes and now a sabotage target.
Almost everything you do online crosses the ocean floor. Between 95 and 99 percent of intercontinental data travels through fiber-optic cables lying on the seabed, not through satellites. There are around 570 cable systems in service covering well over a million kilometers, and the deep-water sections are about as thick as your thumb.
The pattern is old. The first working transatlantic telegraph cable was laid in 1858, failed within weeks, and was replaced by a permanent one in 1866. Britain then built and owned most of the world's cable network, and it turned out to be a weapon. In the first days of August 1914 a British ship cut Germany's transatlantic cables, pushing German traffic onto radio or onto lines running through British hands. That is why the Zimmermann Telegram, offering Mexico an alliance against the United States, was read in London before it reached Mexico City.
Who owns them now
The economics have shifted. Cables used to be built by consortia of telephone carriers. Most new capacity is now built or bought outright by Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft, which move such enormous volumes of their own traffic that renting no longer makes sense.
The geography is the vulnerability. Traffic is not spread evenly across the oceans. Nearly all data between Europe and Asia funnels through the Red Sea and across Egypt, where a handful of cables come ashore within a few kilometers of one another. Cut those and a continent's worth of traffic has to reroute the long way around, if there is spare capacity to carry it.
Repair capacity is thin. Between 150 and 200 faults happen every year, and roughly 86 percent are caused by fishing gear and anchors rather than anything sinister. Fixing one means sending a specialized ship to locate the break, grapple the cable off the seabed, haul it up, splice it, and lay it back down. There are only about 60 such ships in the world, many are near the end of their working lives, and each one has to be in the right ocean, cleared by the coastal state, in weather that allows the work.
Sabotage
Since 2022 the accidents have started looking deliberate. The Nord Stream gas pipelines were destroyed by explosives in September 2022. In October 2023 the Balticconnector pipeline between Finland and Estonia and two telecom cables were damaged when a Chinese-owned ship dragged its anchor over them. In November 2024 two cables, one between Finland and Germany and one between Lithuania and Sweden, were cut within a day of each other as another vessel passed above them. On Christmas Day 2024 the Estlink 2 power cable and four telecom lines between Finland and Estonia were cut by a tanker in Russia's shadow fleet whose anchor had been dragged for dozens of miles along the seabed. A Latvia to Sweden cable was damaged in January 2025.
NATO launched an operation called Baltic Sentry that same month, putting frigates, patrol aircraft, and naval drones over the seabed routes. Cables in the Red Sea have been cut repeatedly since 2024, most plausibly by anchors from ships damaged or abandoned during the Houthi attack campaign.
Why nobody can stop it
The law is close to useless. Cutting a submarine cable has been an international offense since an 1884 convention, and the modern law of the sea repeats the rule. But in international waters only the ship's flag state can prosecute, and the flag is often sold by a registry that asks no questions. Proving intent is nearly impossible, because dragging an anchor across the seabed is precisely what an incompetent crew does by accident.
That is the whole appeal. Cutting a cable is cheap, does real economic damage, is extremely hard to attribute, and stays well below anything that would trigger a military response. It is the clearest current example of how states now apply pressure to each other without going to war.