Risk register · entry
Q3 · EngineeredRed Sea cable cuts
A sinking ship's dragging anchor cut Asia-Europe internet cables.
Tightly coupled systems where one small fault cascades and takes down the whole machine.
Why this room
The mechanism itself, a physical anchor drag severing redundant fiber, is a simple, calculable engineered payoff, but the resolution path got captured by geopolitics (a failed-state permit fight), stretching the tail of the outage from a routine weeks-long repair into a five-month disruption without making the financial loss itself catastrophic, a textbook case of a risk starting in one quadrant and being resolved in another.
The record
- Rubymar hit by Houthi anti-ship missile on 18 February 2024certain
- Rubymar sank on 2 March 2024 (2:15am local / 23:15 GMT March 1), after ~12 days adriftcertain
- Cargo: approximately 21,000 metric tons of fertilizer aboardcertain
- Three cables cut: SEACOM, AAE-1, EIGcertain
- Cut cables carried approximately 25% of regional (Middle East/Asia-Europe corridor) data traffic, per HGC Global Communicationslikely
- AAE-1 cable restored/online mid-July 2024 (repair vessel Niwa, operated by E-Marine)likely
- SEACOM and EIG repairs completed by late July 2024, per Houthi-controlled Yemeni ministry statementsuncertain
- Repair delayed for months by permit disputes between Yemen's rival governmentscertain
- No public dollar cost figure found for the outage or repair; not stated in any source revieweduncertain
Sources
The book
This entry is one of 111 in the register. The full story, and what it cost the people who lived it, is in Risky Business by Claudia Zeisberger, David Munro and Joanna Reijgersberg-Siew.
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