The underwater cables that carry the Internet are in trouble

IF YOU ask the average American, “where does the Internet come from?”, the answer you would most likely get would be from space, via satellites. Wrong. The vast majority of information that flows across the tens of billions of devices connected to the Internet comes from the sea. Around 500 fibre-optic undersea cables carry more than 95 per cent of all Internet data, strung like 19th-century telegraph cables under the oceans. And they are very vulnerable.

While the cables are reasonably sturdy – the fibre strands are protected by many layers of copper, steel and plastics – it is possible to damage them. First, they can be vulnerable to natural disasters, both on the floor of the ocean where earthquakes can disturb them, and at the surface where the cables connect to land-based infrastructure.

A second threat is man-made: from terrorists, anarchists, Luddites who hate the Internet and other random agitators. While such actors can’t really get at the seafloor cables, they can attempt to disrupt the connections at the water’s edge, or use cybertools to hamper the cable operations.