The Internet Under the Sea

This message comes from Progressive Insurance and the name your price tool. It helps you find car insurance options in your budget. Try it today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states. On the evening of 02/18/2024, two ballistic missiles were fired at the Ruby Mar, a massive cargo ship that's longer than the Washington Monument. It was just the latest series of attacks by the Houthis, an Iranian backed rebel group operating in Yemen that's been firing on commercial ships in the Red Sea. The Houthis were trying to disrupt trade in the Red Sea, one of the busiest shipping routes in the world. It's a passage between continents that reduces the time that it takes a ship to travel from Europe to Asia considerably. So for the Red Sea, a huge amount of freight is traveling that way. Dozens of ships pass through these waters daily along with billions of dollars' worth of cargo, And the Ruby Mar was one of those ships. And the crew abandoned ship. They dropped anchor because they were abandoning ship, and then the ship drifted round on its own. Being pushed around aimlessly by sea currents and wind. Then, less than a week later, at the bottom of the Red Sea, something broke. Internet traffic that is going from Europe to Asia cut. I'm sorry. The number you have dialed is not in service at this time. And then also the other place that was impacted was Europe to Africa, to the East Coast Of Africa. This presentation. I dug into the numbers, and as you can see here Joey, it looks like it's frozen since then. In the span of minutes, millions of people from Kenya and Uganda all the way to Vietnam and Singapore had their Internet disrupted. Close to three quarters of the Internet data flow was interrupted between Europe and Asia. It was unclear as to what had happened straight away. But after a few days, it did become clear. Three physical cables. They were all cut around the same time very shortly afterwards, within minutes of each other. The undersea cables that carry all that Internet traffic had been cut. It seems that the anchor that had been dropped must have cut the cables. You know, the weight of the ship would just cause that anchor to plow through the cable. It would drift along, find another cable, cut that, and then cut another one. Okay. Right now, you might be thinking, wait a minute. I thought Internet connections happen over satellites. In fact, almost all intercontinental Internet traffic, the overseas connections that let us do things like make payments, watch movies, or FaceTime our friends, actually go through cables that run along the ocean floor. The Internet relies upon these subsea cables ultimately for the whole thing to work as a global network, global system. If you were to look at a …