Iran warned last week that submarine cables in the Strait of Hormuz were a vulnerable point for the region’s digital economy, raising concerns about potential attacks on critical infrastructure.

The narrow waterway, already a chokepoint for global oil shipments, is equally vital for the digital world. Several fibre-optic cables snake across the seabed of the strait, connecting countries from India and Southeast Asia to Europe via the Gulf states and Egypt.

What makes undersea cables important?

Subsea cables are fibre-optic or electrical cables laid on the sea floor to transmit data and power. They carry around 99% of the world’s internet traffic, according to the ITU, the United Nations specialised agency for digital technologies.

They also carry telecommunications and electricity between countries, and are essential for cloud services and online communications.

“Damaged cables mean the internet slowing down or outages, e-commerce disruptions, delayed financial transactions … and economic fallout from all of these disruptions,” said geopolitical and energy analyst Masha Kotkin.

Gulf countries, particularly the UAE and Saudi Arabia, have been investing billions of dollars in artificial intelligence and digital infrastructure to diversify their economies away from oil. Both nations have established national AI companies serving customers across the region — all reliant on undersea cables to move data at lightning speed.

Major cables through the Strait of Hormuz include the Asia-Africa-Europe 1 (AAE-1), connecting Southeast Asia to Europe via Egypt, with landing points in the UAE, Oman, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia; the FALCON network, connecting India and Sri Lanka to Gulf countries, Sudan, and Egypt; and the Gulf Bridge International Cable System, linking all Gulf countries including Iran.

Additional networks are under construction, including a system led by Qatar’s Ooredoo.

What area the risks?

While the total length of submarine cables has grown considerably between 2014 and 2025, faults have remained stable at around 150–200 incidents per year, according to the International Cable Protection Committee (ICPC).

State-sponsored sabotage remains a risk, but 70–80% of faults are caused by accidental human activities — primarily fishing and ship anchors, according to the ICPC and experts.

Other risks include undersea currents, earthquakes, subsea volcanoes, and typhoons, said Alan Mauldin, research director at telecom research firm TeleGeography. The industry addresses these by burying cables, armouring them, and selecting safe routes, he said.

The US-Israel war on Iran, nearing the two-month mark, has brought unprecedented disruption to global energy supply and regional infrastructure, including hits to Amazon Web Services data centres in Bahrain and the UAE. Subsea cables have been spared so far.

However, an indirect risk exists from damaged vessels inadvertently hitting cables by dragging anchors.

“In a situation of active military operations, the risk of unintentional damage increases, and the longer this conflict lasts, the higher the likelihood of unintentional damage,” Kotkin said. A similar incident occurred in 2024, when a commercial vessel attacked by Iran-aligned Houthis drifted in the Red Sea and severed cables with its anchor.

The degree to which damage to the cables might impact connectivity in Gulf countries depends largely on how much individual network operators rely on them and what alternatives they have, according to TeleGeography.

No easy fix

Repairing damaged cables in conflict zones poses a separate challenge to securing them. While the physical repair itself is not overly complicated, decisions by repair vessel owners and insurers may also be impacted by the risk of damage from fighting or the presence of mines, experts say.

Permits to access territorial waters add another layer of difficulty. “Often one of the biggest problems with doing repairs is you have to get permits into the waters where the damage is. That can take a long time sometimes and can be the biggest source (of problems),” Mauldin said.

Once the conflict ends, industry players will also face the challenge of re-surveying the sea floor to determine safe cable positions and avoid ships or objects that may have sunk during hostilities, he said.

What alternatives are there if subsea cables falter?

While potential damage to subsea cables would not cause a complete connectivity loss — due to land-based links — experts agree that satellite systems are not a feasible replacement, as they cannot handle the same volume of traffic and are more expensive.

“It’s not as though you could just switch to satellite. That’s not an alternative,” Mauldin said, noting that satellites rely on connections to land-based networks and are better suited for things in motion, like airplanes and ships.

Low-Earth-orbit networks such as Starlink are “a boutique solution, which is not scalable to millions of users, at this time,” Kotkin added.

Dances with Wolves star Nathan Chasing Horse was handed a life imprisonment sentence on Monday, April 27, 2026.

Chasing Horse was convicted of sexual assault in a Las Vegas courtroom on Monday, April 27.

‘This is a miscarriage of justice,’ Chasing Horse said after a Nevada judge announced the judgment.

Judge Jessica Peterson sentenced Chasing Horse to a total of 37 years of life imprisonment.

Chasing Horse, who has continued to plead not guilty, was accused by three women, including a minor girl, when the assaults began.

Chasing Horse had also been cleared on some of the charges.

He was found guilty by the Clark County jury on 13 of the 21 counts filed against him in January this year.

The sentencing ends a year-long process of prosecuting the former actor after he was first arrested and indicted in 2023.

During sentencing, the Las Vegas court heard statements from victims and their loved ones narrating the trauma inflicted upon them by Chasing Horses’ actions.

Prosecutors alleged Chasing Horse, recognized for his role as Smiles A Lot in the film Dances With Wolves, used his role as a self-professed medicine man to run a cult and sexually exploit and abuse women and children.

Chasing Horse will now serve his sentence in the Nevada Department of Corrections, besides getting life imprisonment; he is also facing warrants for alleged crimes in Montana and Canada.