Sabotaged Cables, SpaceX’s $17 B Spectrum Bet & 5G/6G Leaps – Global Mobile Internet Roundup (Sept 9–10, 2025)
A sudden undersea fiber break has wreaked havoc on internet traffic between Europe, the Middle East and Asia. On Sept 7, monitors detected that two critical submarine cables – SEA-ME-WE 4 and IMEWE – were cut near Jeddah, Saudi Arabia ts2.tech. The impact was felt across continents: data slowed to a crawl or stopped entirely in countries including India, Pakistan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the UAE ts2.tech. Major Gulf ISPs like Etisalat and Du experienced nationwide slowdowns, and millions of users saw sluggish or lost connectivity as traffic scrambled to re-route ts2.tech ts2.tech. Even Microsoft sounded the alarm, warning Azure cloud customers of increased latency due to “multiple undersea fiber cuts in the Red Sea” forcing data onto longer paths