Submarine cable cuts at Jeddah impact connectivity in the Indian subcontinent
I was away from my system since Friday evening, and as I look at various alerts, latency, packet loss and routing changes, it seems like quite a lot has happened since Saturday early morning. Latency from India to Europe has increased across all known large telcos - Airtel, Tata Comm, Jio, etc.
One sample trace from my server in the EU on Contabo -> Airtel India:
HOST: server7.anuragbhatia.com Loss% Snt Last Avg Best Wrst StDev
1. AS51167 ip-11-191-88-45.static.contabo.net (45.88.191.11) 0.0% 10 0.3 0.3 0.3 0.5 0.1
2. AS??? 10.0.66.2 0.0% 10 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.4 0.1
3. AS3356 212.133.82.97 0.0% 10 7.1 10.2 7.1 21.5 4.7
4. AS??? ??? 100.0 10 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
5. AS174 port-channel2813.ccr92.dca04.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.82.2) 0.0% 10 90.0 90.0 89.9 90.1 0.1
6. AS174 be3483.ccr42.atl01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.172.170) 0.0% 10 106.9 107.0 106.7 107.3 0.1
7. AS174 port-channel3704.ccr92.jan02.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.40.110) 0.0% 10 113.7 123.0 113.6 206.3 29.3
8. AS174 be8122.ccr32.dfw01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.41.53) 0.0% 10 121.6 121.6 121.4 122.1 0.2
9. AS174 be3846.ccr22.elp02.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.165.30) 0.0% 10 134.8 134.6 134.4 134.8 0.1
10. AS174 be5473.ccr32.phx01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.166.70) 0.0% 10 141.6 142.9 141.5 153.2 3.6
11. AS174 be2932.ccr42.lax01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.45.162) 0.0% 10 152.1 152.0 151.8 152.2 0.1
12. AS174 be3360.ccr41.lax04.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.25.150) 0.0% 10 147.3 149.4 147.1 168.6 6.7
13. AS174 38.122.147.122 0.0% 10 146.6 147.5 146.5 150.5 1.3
14. AS9498 116.119.112.26 0.0% 10 320.9 321.0 320.6 323.2 0.8
15. AS9498 152.52.190.90 0.0% 10 335.3 335.3 335.2 335.4 0.1
Lumen EU > Cogent EU (likely on hop 4 - remember hot potato routing) > Cogent Washington > Cogent Los Angeles > Bharti Airtel handover in Los Angeles -> India (via Pacific)
Here’s an average latency graph of 3 EU sources -> 9 Airtel endpoints in India for the last 48 hours:
As per this issue, it started at 04:00 IST (GMT+5.5) on 06 Sept 2025. Jio as well as Tata Comm endpoints show similar latency. The same also matches the route drop across
Here’s a combined graph of Airtel, Jio, ACT broadband and Excitel:
What caused it?
The time of this latency jump seems to be related to news about IMEWE and SMW4 fibre cut near Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. While there’s not much reported in India, PTCL Pakistan issued a statement on x about these outages. The cable cut point impacts Indian traffic as well. IMEWE lands in Mumbai, and both Airtel & Tata Comm are the consortium partners. SMW4 is an older cable and lands in both Mumbai & Chennai as it crosses over from the West to the East. As far as I can find, there’s no official report by Indian telcos about this, but time as well as latency/packet loss very much show that it is related.
Another metric outside of latency/packet loss to view is the route announcement. Here’s the charge of AS9498 route announcement at DECIX Frankfurt:
Impact on traffic?
While only respective networks can tell how much of their capacity depends on it. Do keep in mind that over 90% of traffic for Indian retail-facing operators is local. That’s content to eyeball traffic. So whether there’s an impact or not would depend more on whether Google/Facebook/Microsoft/AWS store a lot of Indian accessed content in the EU or not. If not, it would be a small % of overall traffic, even though it may impact a higher percentage of international traffic. For anyone in businesses of connecting Indian endpoints with the EU (CRM, VoIP), etc, it may be 100% of their traffic. So it would depend on the kind of traffic profile.
Disclaimer: This is my personal blog, and hence, posts made here are in my personal capacity. These do not represent the views of my employer.
Update: 15 Sep 2025
Seems like Bharti Airtel AS9498 capacity is getting restored. This is visible in reduced latency from EU to Airtel endpoints in India as well as their route announcements at DE-CIX FRA.
