Houthi Attacks Broke the Internet's Backbone. The UAE Is Racing to Build a New One

On the morning of September 6, 2025, internet users across the Middle East, South Asia and parts of Africa started noticing something was off. Video calls stuttered, cloud apps lagged, and network monitors lit up. Within hours, the internet-monitoring group NetBlocks had confirmed the cause: two major undersea cables, SEA-ME-WE 4 and IMEWE, had been severed in the Red Sea near Jeddah, with a third system, FALCON GCX, also affected.

It wasn't an isolated glitch. Gulf News reported that UAE users saw noticeable slowdowns in the days that followed, even as the country's telecom operators scrambled to reroute traffic around the damage. The likely cause, according to an International Cable Protection Committee official, was mundane rather than sinister — a ship's anchor dragging across the seabed. But mundane doesn't mean low-stakes. The Red Sea corridor carries a huge share of the data traffic moving between Europe and Asia, and since Yemen's Houthi rebels began attacking commercial shipping in that same stretch of water in late 2023, every cable fault there gets read against a backdrop of deliberate sabotage, whether or not that's what actually happened.

That single morning is also the clearest explanation for something that's been happening quietly for the past two years: the UAE has turned into one of the most contested pieces of real estate in the global submarine cable map.

The Internet Is Mostly Wires at the Bottom of the Ocean

It's easy to forget that "the cloud" runs through something as physical as a garden hose. More than 95% of intercontinental internet and data traffic — video calls, bank transfers, cloud backups, this article loading on your phone — travels through fiber-optic cables laid along the seafloor, bundled in steel armor and buried where ships might snag them. There are several hundred of these systems worldwide, and a surprisingly small number of geographic chokepoints where most of them converge: the English Channel, the Luzon Strait, the Strait of Malacca, and the Red Sea–Bab-el-Mandeb corridor connecting Europe to Asia via the Suez Canal.

That last one is the problem. For decades, a cable running from Marseille to Mumbai or Singapore had one practical route: down through the Suez Canal and the Red Sea. It's shorter and cheaper than going around Africa. It's also a narrow, shallow, geopolitically volatile shipping lane where a single dragged anchor — or a missile, as operators now have to consider — can degrade connectivity for a billion people at once.

Why the Cable Builders Are All Looking at the UAE

The response from the industry has been to build alternate pathways that skip the Red Sea bottleneck entirely, and the UAE has positioned itself as the place where those alternate routes meet.

The clearest example is Africa-1 and 2Africa, the latter billed as the world's largest subsea cable system at roughly 45,000 kilometers, built by Alcatel Submarine Networks for a consortium that includes Meta, Vodafone, Orange, China Mobile International and others. The UAE's e& (formerly Etisalat) was named to anchor and land the cable domestically, with a station at Kalba that complements e&'s existing Fujairah landing site — deliberately outside the Strait of Hormuz chokepoint and away from the Red Sea route. e& has since said the system is live and integrated into its UAE SmartHub data center infrastructure, with reported capacity in the range of 180 terabits per second.

e&'s domestic rival du isn't sitting still either. In February 2026, du announced a partnership with Datawave Networks to land the Singapore-India-Gulf (SING) cable system in the UAE, explicitly pitched as a way to reduce dependence on Red Sea routes by giving Asia-to-Europe traffic a path that comes ashore in the Gulf instead. Du has also paired with Peace Cable International to bring the Peace Gulf Extension onshore, and a separate Al Khaleej system, linking Bahrain to the UAE and other Gulf states, is reportedly targeted to go live in the first half of 2026.

Then there's the more unusual option: skip the sea for part of the journey. An Iraqi-Emirati consortium has floated a roughly $700 million hybrid project that would run a subsea cable from Fujairah to Iraq's Faw peninsula, then continue overland through Iraq into Turkey — avoiding the Red Sea altogether by cutting across land instead. It's a multi-year build, but it illustrates how seriously operators are now treating route diversity as a design requirement rather than a nice-to-have.

A Hub, Not Just a Pass-Through

What makes this more than a story about pipes is what the UAE is doing with the traffic once it lands. Rather than simply letting cables pass through on their way to Europe, both e& and du have built their landing stations directly into hyperscale data center campuses — e&'s SmartHub among them — so that content and cloud providers can peer and cache data inside the country instead of routing it elsewhere. Combined with the UAE's existing free zones, low-latency links to Asia, Africa and Europe, and government pushes like the national AI strategy, that turns cable landings into a pitch for something bigger: positioning the country as the default place in the Middle East where global data actually lives, not just passes through.

It's a bet with obvious risk attached — the same geography that makes the UAE attractive as a crossroads is the geography next to some of the world's most volatile shipping lanes. But after September 2025, the case for redundancy over elegance is hard to argue with. The next time a cable gets cut in the Red Sea, the UAE is trying to make sure it's a shrug, not a headline.

Sources: Gulf News ("UAE internet users report slowdowns after Red Sea cable cuts" and "Red Sea cable chaos: why the internet didn't go dark"), Telecom Review, Gulf Business, SubTel Forum, Capacity Media, and e&'s own announcements on the 2Africa landing.