Azure latency after Red Sea undersea cable cuts

Microsoft reports Azure latency after Red Sea cable cuts

Microsoft notified customers that some Azure traffic experienced increased latency after multiple undersea fiber cables were cut in the Red Sea. The outage affected traffic routed through the Middle East and connections terminating in Asia and Europe.

The company did not identify who or what caused the cuts. In its status update, Microsoft warned that undersea repairs can be slow, so engineers were continuously monitoring networks, rebalancing traffic, and optimizing routing to limit customer impact.

By Saturday evening Microsoft said it was no longer detecting Azure issues, suggesting their mitigation steps and alternate routing reduced the observable impact for most customers.

Why this matters: undersea cables are the highways of global cloud traffic. When a major route is severed, traffic either slows as it reroutes down longer paths or concentrates on remaining links, creating bottlenecks and latency spikes. For latency-sensitive applications and cross-region services, the results are immediate.

• Assess your multi-region failover: ensure critical workloads have clear alternate regions.
• Validate BGP and routing policies so traffic automatically shifts without manual intervention.
• Use CDNs and edge nodes to localize user traffic and minimize dependence on long-haul links.

For enterprises and public-sector networks, this event is a reminder to test communications under degraded conditions. Exercises that simulate cable faults or regional blackouts reveal hidden single points of failure and help build automated playbooks.

QuarkyByte’s approach to incidents like this combines data-driven impact analysis with practical routing and architecture recommendations. We model traffic shifts, quantify potential latency and availability impact, and recommend configuration changes—such as prioritized egress paths, CDN placement, and regional replication—to reduce customer exposure to single-link failures.

Cloud providers can and do reroute traffic, but customers retain control over architecture and configuration that determine real-world impact. If your services cross the affected corridors, now is the time to validate failover, check peering and BGP settings, and confirm observability covers cross-region latency patterns.

Unexpected fiber cuts will keep happening. The difference between a brief hiccup and a business outage is planning, testing, and rapid operational playbooks. Organizations that prepare for link-level failures will see fewer customer-impacting disruptions when the next undersea highway is disrupted.