Unstoppable but Not Fast: Azure Delays Due to Red Sea Cable Disruption Expose the World's "Narrow Neck"

Around September 6, 2025, multiple submarine cable disruptions, including SMW4 and IMEWE, occurred in the Red Sea, leading to decreased connectivity across a wide area from Asia to the Middle East. Microsoft explained on the Azure status page that "traffic via the Middle East is experiencing increased latency, but services continue through rerouting." Reports of "heavy" and "intermittent" connectivity issues emerged from India, Pakistan, and the UAE, with the name of a major UAE carrier appearing in the news. The Red Sea to Suez route is a "bottleneck" through which about 17% of global traffic passes, and simultaneous disruptions in several systems can cause ripples at the edges of the world. Repairs typically take several weeks, and in the meantime, increased RTT and jitter due to rerouting are challenges. Operationally, the following were reaffirmed: ① visualization of route biases, ② establishment of conditions for switching multi-region/multi-CDN, ③ delay tolerance at the application layer (compression, retries, timeout optimization), and ④ standardization of customer notifications. While cloud availability was maintained, the trade-off between "uninterrupted" and "fast" became apparent.