How the Hormuz Crisis Could Disrupt the Internet’s Backbone

Added: 2026-05-16

[00:00:00]When I look at the map of subsea cables going across the Strait of Hormuz, it's like Saudi Arabia connecting to, I guess, Iran.

[00:00:08]Can they cripple the global internet by snapping those cables in particular, or would it just cripple the connectivity between, you know, the countries that are sort of clustered around there? It would definitely impede the countries clustered around them. But we also have to remember that the internet doesn't function like a highway, in the sense that the fastest route between two points is not necessarily the the shortest route.

[00:00:28]Okay, so for example, if I'm sitting in London and I'm sort of pinging a server, uh, in, let's say Portugal, um, it may well be that at that particular moment and this router is making the decision for me, the shortest route is to France and then onward to Portugal, um, by land rather than through sea through.

[00:00:47]Well, I say okay. Um, it may also be that I live in Saudi Arabia, but I'm a Gmail user and my Gmail data is being stored somewhere else that's being stored maybe in Western Europe, or it's being stored even in the US. You don't know which server your data lives on at all. And so when you sort of cut a bunch of cables that service that particular part of the world, you're also essentially forcing the rest of the internet to reroute itself constantly until until these cables are fixed.