Severed undersea cables in the Red Sea forced Microsoft Azure traffic onto congested alternate routes, causing increased latency and degraded performance across South Asia, the Gulf and Asia to Europe routes. The incident highlights undersea cable disruption risks and the need for cloud resilience strategies.
On September 6, 2025 at about 05:45 UTC multiple undersea fiber cables in the Red Sea were severed, forcing Microsoft Azure traffic to be rerouted and causing higher latency and degraded performance for customers whose traffic transits the Middle East. The event affected users across South Asia, the Gulf and Asia to Europe routes and exposed how a small number of physical links can create a major cloud service outage.
The internet depends on hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber optic cable on the ocean floor. These submarine links carry over 95 percent of international data traffic, so an undersea cable disruption can quickly become a global problem. Systems reported impacted include SEA ME WE 4 and IMEWE, among other long haul systems that connect Asia, the Middle East and Europe.
Microsoft posted status alerts about service degradation and increased latency as traffic was forced onto alternate routes. The sudden reroutes caused congestion and cascading delays, producing an incident many will search for as Microsoft Azure downtime 2025 or cloud service outage 2025. Other cloud and internet operators also saw knock on effects, underscoring the interdependence of global networks.
The Red Sea incident makes it clear that software level redundancy and data center replication do not eliminate risks that originate in physical infrastructure. Organizations seeking cloud resilience strategies 2025 should map critical routes, validate alternate connectivity such as satellite backup and private peering, and update recovery runbooks for scenarios labeled undersea cable disruption 2025 or global internet outage undersea cable. Investing in telemetry that detects latency shifts and in automated failover policies can reduce recovery time and customer impact.
This outage is a reminder that digital services rest on physical systems that are vulnerable to damage or disruption. For enterprises and cloud architects the takeaway is simple: assume that network links can fail and design multi layer resilience into systems. Practical steps include adopting cross cloud redundancy solutions, documenting Azure outage response best practices and building a tested cloud continuity management plan so that when the next undersea cable cut occurs you are ready.
For real time guidance, organizations should monitor official status updates from their cloud provider and implement proven Azure availability and disaster recovery measures to mitigate the impact of future incidents.
