The physical borders of the digital world

On June 7th 2022 Asia-Africa-Europe-1, a fibre-optic cable which connects Europe and Asia, was cut where it crosses land in Egypt. Somalia and Ethiopia lost 85% of their connectivity for several hours; the cloud services of Amazon, Google and Microsoft were all briefly disrupted, increasing latency for much international traffic; LinkedIn went down. And that was just one cable, on land, where the repair job was simple. Were all of the subsea cables to be severed at, say, the entrance to the Red Sea between Yemen and Djibouti, financial transactions would stutter. Zoom calls between London and Singapore would lag and glitch. Connectivity would persist—packets would be rerouted through America, or through space via satellites—but not without major slowdowns.