Subsea cables carry 99 percent of transoceanic digital traffic.[3] The cables themselves are engineered to absorb damage; the repair system has far less slack.[2] Three reads this week make the same point from different directions: outages are a repair problem, not a routing problem.
At the 2026 ICPC plenary in Athens (14–16 April 2026), Meta submarine-cable engineer Andy Palmer-Felgate presented the industry's annual repair data: 178 repairs took place in 2025, against a 190-repair annual average, across 137 jurisdictions.[1]
The network depends on a global fleet of around 60 specialized vessels that lay and maintain the world's cables, and fewer than 20 of these ships are dedicated solely to repair.[2] Faults are frequent — 150 to 200 a year, 70 to 80 percent of them accidents of fishing gear and ships' anchors — so availability is the whole game.[2]
Investment has not followed the build: the industry now sees some $4 billion to $5 billion in annual investment, close to double what it was a decade ago, while consultant Mike Constable (Infra-Analytics, SMART Cables) says "we have a lack of investment in the maintenance ship fleet" — an expensive Mercedes, he says, with almost nothing spent on the insurance.[2]
The Red Sea was, until recently, the highway of the global internet: roughly 95 percent of data traffic between Asia and Europe transited its waters.[3] The first major outage there, in February 2024, took nearly six months to fix because no one could secure safe passage for repair vessels into Houthi-controlled waters.[3]
The industry's phrase for the lesson is Roderick Beck's: "the outages in themselves are not the problem. The problem is the inability to repair them in any reasonable length of time."[3]
And the choke points multiplied. The US-led military campaign against Iran in early 2026 turned the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf into an active war zone; Alcatel Submarine Networks issued force majeure notices and halted work on Meta's 2Africa Pearls extension, and SEA-ME-WE 6 — originally scheduled for 2024, already delayed to June 2027 — faces further uncertainty.[3] Those Hormuz cables still carry less than 1 percent of global international bandwidth, but the repair ships needed for the whole region sit behind the same door.[2]
A broken cable is a clock. Every day without repair spends the network's redundancy, and a second fault can turn an invisible incident into congestion or disconnection — while the longest repair delay on record is 947 days.[1]
The physical internet's fragile part is not the glass on the seabed; it is the small, aging, under-invested fleet of ships that can get to it safely.[2]
[1] https://www.iscpc.org/events/2026-plenary-meeting/ — ICPC 2026 Plenary Highlights (Athens): Global Cable Repair Data Analysis
[2] https://scientificamerican.com/article/iran-threats-expose-the-aging-fleet-that-repairs-undersea-internet-cables — Scientific American, Ramin Skibba, "Iran's cable threats expose the aging fleet that fixes the Internet"
[3] https://rb.ax/blog/no-one-is-coming-to-fix-the-subsea-cables — Ryan Bagley, "No One Is Coming to Fix the Subsea Cables"