Microsoft Azure Faces Outages After Red Sea Cable Damage, Internet Disrupted in India & Pakistan

Microsoft warned customers on Saturday that users of its Azure cloud platform may experience increased latency after multiple undersea fibre cables were cut in the Red Sea. The outage also degraded internet connectivity across parts of West Asia and South Asia, including India and Pakistan.

Microsoft’s public status update said traffic that normally traverses West Asia “may experience increased latency due to undersea fibre cuts in the Red Sea,” and that routing changes would be implemented while engineers monitor and optimise paths to reduce customer impact. The company added that traffic not routed through the region was unaffected.

internet monitor NetBlocks reported the incident as a series of subsea cable outages and flagged degraded connectivity in multiple countries; local carriers in the UAE and Pakistan posted notices pointing to cuts near Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The scale of the damage and the identity of any responsible party remained unclear.

Repair Underway

Cloud and network operators said such undersea-fibre breaks can take time to repair, so the immediate mitigation step is to rebalance and reroute traffic through alternate links, a process that often increases latency and can reduce throughput for services that normally take the shorter, damaged route.

Microsoft said it was rerouting affected traffic and continuously tracking performance while repairs proceed.

The outages followed a pattern of vulnerability for Red Sea routes, which carried substantial Asia–Europe traffic and were hit by similar incidents in the past year. Observers noted the geopolitical sensitivity of the region amid maritime tensions but emphasised that technical causes, such as ship anchors or accidental damage, remain possible explanations until investigations conclude.

By late Saturday Microsoft’s status messages indicated it was monitoring the situation and implementing fixes; many reports said core services were rerouted and broader interruptions were reduced as operators stabilised traffic flows, though latency persisted for some customers while subsea repairs are scheduled.

What Next?

Customers whose traffic normally transits West Asia should plan for slower-than-usual connections and intermittent performance hits for latency-sensitive applications (real-time voice, video conferencing and some cloud-hosted workloads).

Enterprises with critical deployments are advised to check their cloud provider’s status pages, consider temporary failover to alternate regions or providers, and liaise with network teams about routing and CDN options.

Repairing damaged submarine cables requires specialised ships and can take days to weeks depending on weather and the number of breaks. The episode underscores the fragility of global internet backbone routes and the value of diverse, redundant network paths for cloud resilience, a growing concern for businesses that rely on seamless cross-border connectivity.