What the September 2025 Red Sea cable cuts affected

The Red Sea cable disruption in September 2025 affected connections across parts of the Middle East and South Asia. Cloudflare's quarterly report records service-provider warnings and measurements from its own network ^[1].

The observed impact

On September 6, Etisalat and du warned UAE customers about slower data services. Cloudflare measured an Etisalat traffic drop of up to 28%. For du, its observed median bandwidth fell from 25 Mbps to as low as 9.8 Mbps, while median latency rose from 30 milliseconds to more than 60 ^[1].

Those measurements describe particular networks and periods. They do not mean every UAE connection lost the same amount of speed.

Read outage reports by route

Cloudflare also measured higher latency on some India-to-Europe routes, while probes using its own backbone were unaffected ^[1]. That distinction explains why two services can behave differently during the same cable incident.

Our two posts covered the initial disruption and concern about repairs. The cited measurements establish the disruption; they do not establish a six-week repair deadline. For a current connection problem, check the affected provider's current status rather than treating this historical incident as an ongoing outage.