A significant amount of this nation’s financial transactions, diplomatic communications, and internet traffic are currently carried by a fiber-optic cable about the thickness of a garden hose that is currently laying on the Atlantic Ocean floor. It is so near the seafloor that it can be severed by a ship’s anchor if it is tugged at the incorrect angle in the wrong location. Until the outage reports began to come in, no one standing above the water would be aware that anything had occurred.
This isn’t speculative. Since late 2024, at least eight such cable cutting have happened in the Baltic Sea in four different instances involving vessels connected to China or Russia. A cargo ship named the Fitburg was suspected of dragging its anchor across a fiber-optic wire that ran from Helsinki to Tallinn, so Finnish special forces boarded it on New Year’s Eve 2025 in the Gulf of Finland. It was the most recent in a pattern that NATO has observed carefully enough to initiate Baltic Sentry, a specialized multinational patrol mission, to more vigorously monitor the seabed. In February 2026, the European Commission followed with funding for new subsea infrastructure totaling €347 million.
The same fundamental weaknesses affect America’s underwater cable network, but they are more widespread. Submarine cables, not satellites, carry around 99 percent of all intercontinental data traffic. Satellites are good for remote coverage but not for carrying the kind of volume required by cloud computing and global finance because they are slower, have less capacity, and are significantly more expensive per bit. The infrastructure represented by the cables spanning the Atlantic and Pacific is not easily diverted through another system in the event of a large-scale disruption. It doesn’t exist.
The geography of risk is what makes the situation structurally challenging. The shallow coastal waters close to their landing points—the locations where they come ashore and connect to the terrestrial internet—are where cables are most accessible and susceptible. These landing spots are frequently well-known to the general people, occasionally indicated on maps, and situated in areas that a ship may access without drawing special notice.
Although it is more difficult to access and harm deeper ocean parts, a state actor with the necessary tools and time may nonetheless succeed. According to several intelligence assessments, Russia has made significant investments in underwater weapons that may strike seabed infrastructure, and since 2022, its actions near European cables have made the issue tangible rather than hypothetical.
The aspect of this that receives insufficient attention is the repair bottleneck. When a cable breaks, a specialist cable ship is needed to mend it. This type of vessel is capable of locating the problem, retrieving the cable from depth, splicing a repair portion, and redeploying the cable. There are about 60 of these vessels in the world, and a global network of hundreds of operational cable systems constantly requires routine maintenance for them. Under normal circumstances, the median repair period for a submarine cable defect worldwide is approximately 40 days. Since the ships can only perform one task at a time, a coordinated attack that targets several cables at once in the same area could significantly extend that timescale.
