Navigating Your Subsea Network Through Tense Scenarios
Ongoing tensions around the Strait of Hormuz have put a spotlight on a risk the industry has long understood: too much of the world's data still moves through too few narrow passages.
Subsea cables carry the overwhelming majority of the world's internet, financial, and cloud traffic. Most people never think about them, because the system is built to be invisible. Tension in the Strait of Hormuz is testing that assumption in real time.
Iranian officials and state-linked media have repeatedly signaled intent to assert control over cables transiting the Strait, including proposals to charge transit fees to the tech companies that depend on them. At the same time, ongoing hostilities have made the Strait and the nearby Red Sea largely inaccessible to the specialized repair vessels that fix cable faults when they happen. Faults that would normally take weeks to resolve are now facing indefinite delays.
This matters beyond the Gulf. Cables through Hormuz and the Red Sea connect Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, and they underpin the data center and AI buildout underway across the region. When a chokepoint closes, or even just becomes unpredictable, traffic has to find another way through. The question every network operator should be asking is whether their traffic has one.
This is a pattern, not an isolated incident
Hormuz is the latest flashpoint, but it isn't the first, and it won't be the last. Subsea cables have absorbed a steady run of disruptions over the past two years, from deliberate targeting to anchor drags to natural events. A timeline of the major incidents since early 2024:
Red Sea cables cut near Yemen
An anchor drag severed cables carrying Seacom/TGN-EA, EIG, and AAE-1 traffic, an early sign of how exposed the Red Sea corridor had become amid regional conflict.
West Africa rockslide outage
A suspected underwater rockslide off Côte d'Ivoire damaged four cables converging at a single point (WACS, ACE, MainOne, SAT-3), knocking out or degrading internet service across 13 West and Central African countries.
East Africa cable damage
Damage to the SEACOM and EASSy cables off the South African coast disrupted connectivity across Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Malawi, and Mozambique.
Baltic Sea: BCS East-West & C-Lion1
Two cables linking Finland, Germany, and Lithuania were disrupted within a day of each other. A Chinese-flagged vessel under scrutiny at the time prompted NATO and EU accusations of hybrid warfare.
Further Baltic incidents
The Estlink 2 power cable and a Latvia-Sweden data cable were both damaged within weeks of each other, continuing a pattern that led NATO to launch its Baltic Sentry patrol program in 2025.
Cable damage near Taiwan
Five separate incidents damaged cables in waters around Taiwan, several involving vessels linked to China, adding a second geopolitical hotspot to the list of regions where cable security and territorial tension now overlap.
Red Sea cable cluster severed again
A second major cut in the Red Sea slowed cloud services and cross-border financial transactions across Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. Limited regional repair access extended the disruption well beyond a typical fault window.
Fitburg incident & Arelion cable damage
Finnish special forces boarded a vessel suspected of dragging its anchor across a Helsinki–Tallinn cable on the last day of 2025. Days later, Arelion's BCS East cable connecting Latvia and Lithuania was also damaged.
EU responds with a €347M package
The European Commission introduced a Cable Security Toolbox and a €347 million subsea infrastructure initiative, including a Rapid Repair Pilot for the Baltic, the largest EU-level investment in cable protection to date.
Globally, the median time to repair a single subsea cable fault runs around 40 days under normal conditions, and considerably longer when repair ships can't safely reach the site. Regions with limited redundancy and thin repair capacity, including parts of West Africa, the Pacific, and now the Gulf, are the ones most exposed when a fault occurs.
How networks navigate through it
None of this is a reason to panic, but it is a reason to plan. Networks that weather these disruptions well tend to share a few habits in common:
Build in route diversity upfront
Contract capacity across more than one subsea corridor so a single strait, sea, or region isn't the only way traffic can move.
Spread risk across cable systems
Use more than one cable system and operator on a given route. Cables that share a corridor can still share risk from the same event.
Land in more than one place
Connect through multiple landing stations and geographies so an incident at one location doesn't isolate a region's traffic entirely.
Keep a terrestrial backup path
Pair subsea routes with terrestrial fiber options where possible, giving traffic an alternate path when ocean routes are compromised.
Monitor and reroute in real time
Maintain visibility into cable and route health so traffic engineering decisions happen before an outage cascades, not after.
Work from a carrier-neutral facility
Operate out of a facility with access to multiple carriers and cable systems, so shifting between them during a disruption is a configuration change, not a renegotiation.
A single-path network has a single point of failure
Two of the busiest connectivity corridors on earth run through the same two narrow passages. Diversifying the physical route, and the landing infrastructure on either end, is what keeps traffic moving when one of them is disrupted.
What "diverse connectivity" actually means
Diversity isn't a single feature you can buy off a shelf. It's a set of independent choices, stacked together, so that no single event, geopolitical, physical, or operational, can take a network fully offline.
Multiple physical paths
Connectivity across more than one subsea corridor, and increasingly, terrestrial backup routes, so a single strait or sea isn't the only way through.
Multiple cable systems
Access to more than one cable operator and system on a given route, since even parallel cables in the same waters can share risk from the same event.
Multiple landing points
Cables that come ashore in more than one location, so a disruption at a single landing station doesn't isolate a region's traffic.
Carrier neutrality
Facilities that let a business connect to many carriers and networks in one place, instead of being locked into whichever single provider happens to reach them.
Where NJFX fits
NJFX operates a carrier-neutral cable landing station and Tier 3 data center on the New Jersey coast, one of the connectivity gateways between the U.S. and the rest of the world. That geography isn't a marketing point, it's physics: subsea cables land where the coastline allows them to, and that determines where diversity is actually possible to build.
Because NJFX is carrier-neutral, customers aren't limited to one cable system or one path across the ocean. They can connect to multiple subsea systems and terrestrial networks from a single facility, building the kind of route and carrier diversity that current events are making a practical necessity rather than a nice-to-have.
This isn't a new conversation for NJFX. Two years ago, NJFX hosted a Critical Infrastructure Forum session focused specifically on educating enterprise and financial markets on navigating their networks through geopolitical tension, and on what diverse connectivity solutions actually look like in practice. NJFX has continued to hold these forums as new trends and new conflicts have emerged, most recently with a SecureWAVES CIF built around the intersection of subsea infrastructure and AI. The throughline across all of them is the same: geopolitical risk to global connectivity isn't hypothetical, and the enterprises and financial institutions that depend on that connectivity need a working understanding of where their exposure sits.
None of this makes any single region immune to disruption. What it does is give network operators options when disruption happens elsewhere, which is precisely the point.
The lesson isn't new. It's just harder to ignore.
The industry has known for years that too much traffic depends on too few chokepoints. What's changed is that two of the busiest ones are now under strain at the same time, turning a known risk into an active one. Building diverse, carrier-neutral connectivity isn't a response to any single conflict. It's the ongoing work of making sure the network doesn't depend on any one of them.
Want to talk through what route and carrier diversity could look like for your network?
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