How Iran’s Undersea Cable Threat May Hit India’s Internet and Cloud Services

Early this week, Iranian state-linked media floated a plan to charge the operators of undersea cables in the Strait of Hormuz to access, as they call it, Iran’s offshore territory.

This suggestion follows warnings from Iran stating that several important cables in the strait were a vulnerable point for economies in the West Asia and beyond.

According to PTI, Iran's comments expose an invisible foundation of the internet and globalisation itself: the web of more than 500 undersea cables that carries more than 95% of international data traffic. Several of these cables carry critical internet traffic between India, Europe and West Asia.

While the internet may seem like an infrastructure associated with the virtual cloud, in reality, its physical existence is vulnerable due to the real geopolitical clashes in the West Asia.

Inside The Undersea Network

The invisible highways, consisting of fibre-optic wires connecting landing points, are placed hundreds of metres below the surface of the ocean by cable-laying ships.

In the modern information age, undersea cables have become the backbone of digital connectivity, Tomas Lamanauskas, Deputy Secretary-General of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) told UN News in February 2026. He explained that these fiber-optic cable systems, connecting landing points across continents, are laid hundreds of metres below the surface of the ocean by specialised cable-laying ships.

How Global Data Travels

Around 99% of the international internet traffic goes through submarine cables. They dominate the satellite internet technology because of their greater capacity and significantly lower latency. While satellites play an important role in providing emergency connectivity, they cannot match the scale and speed that submarine cables deliver to power the global economy.

The reason for the cable’s effectiveness is their sophisticated engineering. Modern submarine cables contain bundles of fibre-optic strands—each no thicker than a human hair—sheathed in protective layers of plastic, steel and copper to endure deep-sea pressures and potential damage.

Even so, deep-ocean fibre-optic cables are no larger than 17–21 mm diameter – about the size of a domestic garden hose. Closer to shore (in water depths shallower than about 1,500 m), a cable’s diameter may increase to 40–50 mm due to the addition of protective wire armouring, according to the 2009 United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the International Cable Protection Committee (ICPC) report.

Why Hormuz Routes Matter

According to reports, vital cables such as FALCON (owned by Tata Communications of India), Gulf Bridge (GBI) and Tata-TGN Gulf are essential for the digital economies of the UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Oman pass through the Strait of Hormuz and Persian Gulf region. These cables also transport massive volumes of data between India, Europe and West Asia.

As countries such as India rely heavily on these routes, a coordinated disruption of even a few of these systems could choke global internet traffic.

How India Could Suffer

Internet traffic is automatically rerouted if cables are damaged. However, this happens at a price. In such a scenario, India may see slower internet speeds, buffering videos, disrupted video calls and lag in cloud services. In addition, financial systems that depend on fast connectivity like stock trading could also experience disruptions.

That’s not all, the disrupted internet traffic could cause temporary service disruptions or slowdown cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

This could prompt companies to rush and build alternate cable routes and invest in satellite backups, which could kick-start another geopolitical battle to conquer digital infrastructure.

While there is a possibility to reroute traffic around damage, even partial disruption can overload alternate routes, increase delays and degrade performance.

According to Comparitech, a cybersecurity and technology research website, countries such as Japan, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines rely heavily on undersea cables for international internet connectivity.

Why Digital Risks Escalate

Digital chokepoints are becoming geopolitical risks because global internet traffic, cloud services and financial systems increasingly depend on a few critical infrastructures such as undersea cables and data networks, making them vulnerable during conflicts or cyberattacks.

According to a September 2021 report published by EY, digital infrastructure is increasingly becoming central to geopolitical competition as countries view technology networks and data systems as strategic assets tied to economic and national security interests.