Experts: human damage to undersea fiber optic cables would be less severe than military warns; of ~428 cables, one is damaged every couple days, often by nature
IT MIGHT SEEM like nightmare scenario. A terrorist organization or nefarious nation state decides to derail the global internet …
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2018 Wired piece is the skeptical baseline for a debate that has only grown since: experts argue that with roughly one of ~428 cables damaged every couple of days — mostly by nature — deliberate human attack would be absorbed by the same repair machinery rather than 'derailing' the internet. Later coverage keeps vindicating that base rate: research found about 60% of undersea cable faults come from fishing gear or anchors, at $250K–$3M per repair, and officials concluded Baltic Sea damage widely suspected as Russian sabotage was likely maritime accidents.
Yet the security framing has won anyway. The West Africa canyon failure showed how disruptive even non-malicious breaks can be (cables fell nearly 3,000 feet), US officials flagged Chinese-owned repair ships to Google and Meta, and by 2026 companies were racing to deploy monitoring like distributed acoustic sensing (a global scramble to protect submarine cables). The gap between expert risk assessment and military/government posture is now the story's throughline.
First-order effects
- Cable owners and cloud operators absorb near-daily damage through existing repair fleets and traffic rerouting — the immediate cost is maintenance economics ($250K–$3M per fault), not internet collapse.
- Military threat warnings diverge from operators' lived experience, forcing governments to justify hardening programs against a base rate dominated by anchors, fishing gear, and natural events.
Second-order effects
- Hyperscalers like Google and Meta face pressure to vet their repair-ship supply chains after US concerns about China-owned vessels, adding a geopolitical screen to routine maintenance contracting.
- Vendors of monitoring technology such as distributed acoustic sensing gain a market catalyzed more by sabotage fears than by the accident statistics that actually cause most faults.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, submarine cable governance splits in two: an engineering regime built around frequent accidental damage, and a security regime built around rare but politically charged incidents — with budgets and regulation increasingly driven by the latter.
- Cables shift in policy terms from shared commercial infrastructure toward critical national infrastructure, raising the odds of state involvement in routes, landing stations, and repair capacity.
The trend: Subsea cable infrastructure is being reframed from an accident-prone reliability problem into a national-security asset, even as the underlying fault data remains overwhelmingly mundane.