About 99% of international internet traffic travels through cables on the seafloor
Despite all the talk of satellites and "the cloud," almost every message you send overseas runs along cables lying on the ocean floor.
When you load a website hosted on another continent, your data almost certainly doesn’t go up to a satellite. It dives underwater. Roughly 99% of all international internet traffic travels through submarine cables — fibre-optic lines laid directly on the seabed.
There are more than 500 of these commercial cables in service, stretching for around 1.7 million kilometres — long enough to wrap around the Earth several times. Some are no thicker than a garden hose, yet a single cable can carry an enormous share of the traffic between two continents.
This hidden network is why the popular image of “the cloud” is a little misleading: the backbone of global communication is physical, fragile and resting on the ocean floor. Fishing trawlers, ship anchors and undersea earthquakes can sever cables, which is why repair ships stand ready around the world — and why nations increasingly treat these lines as critical infrastructure.
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