Most Internet Traffic Still Goes Through the Ocean, and 60 Percent of Cable Damage Is Accidental
Satellites get the headlines, but the world's data mostly swims. Subsea fiber-optic cables crisscrossing the ocean floor still carry the bulk of global Internet traffic even as Starlink and other satellite services expand, according to Ars Technica. Those cables share the seabed with oil and gas pipelines and submarine power cables, and Elisabeth Braw — a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who leads its Threats to the Global Maritime Order Initiative — argues in a new book, Undersea War, that this infrastructure faces growing sabotage risk as gray-zone warfare and open conflict spread. Her book examines suspicious incidents in which ships drag anchors for unusually long stretches, cutting or damaging cables and pipelines from the Baltic to the Pacific. Worth keeping the base rate in view: Braw acknowledges that roughly 60 percent of undersea cable damage comes primarily from ordinary human error — fishing nets and anchors dragging the seabed — with storms and undersea landslides accounting for a smaller share. Between 150 and 200 cables are damaged each year, and they are usually repaired quickly. The interesting tension is that the mundane cause dominates the totals while the security concern is about a minority of deliberate cases that are harder to characterize.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
If anchors and nets cause the majority of damage, an attacker has a useful disguise: the same signature, plausible deniability built in. That's the whole difficulty of the gray zone.
Braw's book focuses on incidents from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific, so the pattern is being treated as geographically broad rather than a single region's problem.