Microsoft Azure users in parts of Asia, the Middle East, and the Gulf experienced sluggish cloud services on Saturday, September 6, after two undersea cable systems in the Red Sea were cut. The incident triggered service disruptions and delays and the issue was confirmed by Microsoft soon after it happened.
How the outage unfolded
Early on Saturday, Microsoft posted notices on Azure’s status page warning of potential disruptions for customers whose traffic usually flows through the Middle East. This included many businesses and users in South Asia and the Gulf who depend on Azure for their daily cloud connectivity. As the alerts noted, people might see their apps running more slowly, delayed connections, or trouble accessing certain services. The location were first shared by NetBlocks, which claimed that the internet disruption happened due to “series of subsea cable outages” which caused Internet slowdowns in Pakistan, India, and the Middle East.
The cuts affected the SEA-ME-WE-4 and IMEWE cable systems, both of which play a crucial role in linking Asia to Europe. These cables carry a huge amount of international internet traffic, not just for personal use, but for companies and cloud giants like Microsoft, Google, and Meta. When a key route like this goes down, alternate network paths must pick up the slack. However, those backup pathways are inevitably longer and more crowded. For users, that means they could notice a real increase in speed bumps, whether they are playing multiplayer games, downloading large files, or running critical cloud operations for work.
Azure engineers quickly rerouted as much traffic as they could to keep the cloud running. Despite their efforts, Microsoft warned that users could expect higher latency and reduced performance to continue into September 7, and possibly longer. Undersea cable repairs are never quick: ships with specialised crews must reach the exact spot, often facing coordination and security challenges in sensitive waters like the Red Sea.
Cables in this region have had recurring problems in recent years. Earlier outages, including a major incident in February 2024 and another off Qatar in January 2025, both took weeks to fully resolve. Even after previous repairs were completed, fresh faults have occurred. Now, as companies wait for another round of repairs, cable operators have stopped short of giving a concrete timeline for restoring regular service.
For now, Microsoft says that Azure remains up and running for customers outside the directly affected routes. Still, anyone who depends on fast links between Europe, South Asia, and the Gulf should expect slower speeds until repairs are done.
