Microsoft confirmed that Azure customers are experiencing higher latency after multiple undersea fibre lines running through the Red Sea were cut, constraining one of the internet’s busiest corridors. The company said it rerouted traffic across alternate paths, limiting the blast radius but not eliminating slowdowns for workloads that normally traverse the Middle East.
What Microsoft says
According to Microsoft’s service health communications, Azure traffic that typically crosses the Middle East may see increased latency due to Red Sea cable disruptions, while traffic that avoids the region remains unaffected. In practical terms, that means some virtual machines, databases, and platform services will respond more slowly if their data paths usually link Asia, the Gulf, and Europe through the Red Sea/Suez route.
Microsoft emphasized active mitigation, including dynamic routing across its global backbone and partner networks. Those changes keep services reachable, but detours add distance and network hops—classic causes of jitter and higher round-trip times for APIs, replication, and real-time applications.
Why the Red Sea is a choke point
Subsea cables carry the overwhelming majority of intercontinental internet traffic, and the Red Sea–Suez corridor is one of the densest stretches on the planet. Telecom analysts at TeleGeography note more than a dozen major systems converge there, stitching together landing sites in Asia, the Gulf, and the Mediterranean. Globally, there are hundreds of submarine cable systems spanning more than a million kilometres, but only a handful of routes tie Asia and Europe with such efficiency.
Breaks happen for mundane reasons—anchor drags, fishing gear, earthquakes—and sometimes under suspicious circumstances. Earlier incidents in the Red Sea severed multiple systems and forced traffic to take far longer paths. Network researchers at Kentik and Cloudflare have previously documented detours that loop around the Cape of Good Hope when the Red Sea corridor is constrained, a shift that can add tens to more than a hundred milliseconds to end-to-end latency between hubs like Mumbai and Frankfurt.
Who felt the slowdown
NetBlocks, which tracks internet performance, reported degraded connectivity across several countries affected by the latest cuts, including parts of South Asia. Pakistan’s national operator warned customers that congestion could occur during peak hours, citing cable damage near the approaches to Jeddah. Azure customers whose traffic rides those same trunks—whether from the UAE, Qatar, India, or beyond—are the ones most likely to notice symptoms.
The hit is uneven. Workloads confined to a single region generally run normally, but cross-region activity slows: database replication between Gulf and European regions, content delivery networks fetching origins across continents, or latency-sensitive APIs serving users on the “other side” of the break. Video calls, trading feeds, and multiplayer gaming are particularly sensitive to jitter and packet loss that accompany long detours.
How cloud networks mitigate cable failures
Hyperscalers design for failure with excess capacity and diverse paths across multiple cables and terrestrial routes. When cuts occur, Border Gateway Protocol reconverges and operators shift traffic onto remaining links. That resilience keeps services online but cannot conjure bandwidth where the geography is constrained. The Red Sea is a single chokepoint with limited alternatives; when several systems are impaired, the remaining routes saturate.
Repairs are slow. Specialized cable ships must secure permits, locate faults, lift fibre to the surface, splice, and test. Industry bodies such as the International Cable Protection Committee note that weather, security restrictions, and shipping traffic can stretch repairs from weeks to months. During that window, cloud providers juggle capacity and prioritize critical traffic, but users should expect periodic variability.
What Azure customers can do now
First, observe. Track end-to-end performance with Azure Monitor and Application Insights, watching for spikes in latency and timeouts along Middle East paths. Raise timeouts for chatty services, and enable retries with backoff to absorb jitter. Where feasible, move latency-sensitive workloads closer to their users or co-locate dependent services in the same Azure region to avoid cross-corridor hairpins.
Second, diversify. Use Traffic Manager or Front Door to route users to the nearest healthy endpoints, and review cross-region designs so that failover targets aren’t separated by known chokepoints. Customers on ExpressRoute should confirm diverse carriers and physically diverse subsea systems on their private circuits, not just logical diversity. Caching static content and pre-warming replicas can also shave precious milliseconds.
The long game: more routes, fewer chokepoints
New systems under construction, such as the large-scale 2Africa cable and additional terrestrial corridors across the Arabian Peninsula, aim to dilute the Red Sea’s concentration risk. Until that capacity arrives, periodic slowdowns are an unavoidable consequence of damage in a narrow geographic funnel that carries a disproportionate share of Asia–Europe traffic. For Azure users, the immediate story is not an outage but a reminder: in the cloud era, physical geography still sets the speed limit.
