Red Sea Conflict Forces Rerouting of Subsea Cables, Threatening Africa's Cloud Costs
The ongoing conflict in the Red Sea is forcing cloud infrastructure providers and subsea cable operators to identify alternative routing paths for internet traffic. The rerouting directly threatens to raise cloud connectivity costs and increase latency for African markets that depend on those cable routes.
Red Sea Rerouting: Africa is paying for a bottleneck it didn't create
Over 90% of internet traffic between Europe and Asia runs through a strait less than 32 kilometres wide. When that gap becomes a warzone, there is no switching to another sea cable — they all pass through the same narrow water.
The companies scrambling for alternatives are Google, Meta, Microsoft. Their workaround costs are enormous: Google reportedly paid two to three times the market rate just to secure backup fibres across Turkey. Those costs land somewhere.
For African markets already on the expensive end of cloud connectivity, a prolonged rerouting means higher prices and slower connections — not because anything broke here, but because the world's internet was built through a single chokepoint that Africa had no hand in designing and no power to fix.
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- Conflict in the Red Sea is forcing cloud giants to find a new route for the internet · restofworld.org · T2