War Around Strait of Hormuz Forces Halt to Meta’s 2Africa Internet Cable Extension

The notice landed in partners’ inboxes in mid-March with the dry language of a contract dispute, but the message was blunt: Alcatel Submarine Networks could no longer safely work in the Persian Gulf.

The French cable-laying specialist, which is now majority owned by the French state, has declared force majeure and suspended its role on a key section of Meta’s 2Africa subsea cable system, one of the largest undersea internet projects ever attempted. The decision, first reported by Bloomberg and the technology outlet Tom’s Hardware, links the escalating war around Iran directly to the physical backbone of the global internet.

At issue is the 2Africa “Pearls” extension, a planned web of fiber on the seabed that was supposed to tie the Gulf states, Iraq, Pakistan and India into a 45,000-kilometer ring encircling Africa and connecting it to Europe and Asia. Much of the cable for Pearls is already lying on the seafloor, but final work has been frozen as the Strait of Hormuz and surrounding waters turn into an active conflict zone.

According to people briefed on the matter, ASN told partners it “can no longer safely operate in the Persian Gulf” because of the risks created by the 2026 Iran war, including missile and drone attacks on commercial vessels and critical infrastructure.

The suspension highlights how a conflict that has already closed off a fifth of global seaborne oil trade is now constraining data flows as well, exposing the vulnerabilities of an internet that still depends on a handful of narrow maritime corridors.

A cable designed to redraw the map

Meta, then Facebook, and a consortium of telecom carriers announced 2Africa in 2020 as a sprawling system intended to transform connectivity for African markets and provide new high-capacity routes between Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

Built primarily by ASN, the 2Africa system is designed to stretch more than 45,000 kilometers once all segments are complete, making it one of the longest subsea cable networks in the world. The core ring connects 33 countries, looping from the United Kingdom and Portugal through the Mediterranean and Red Sea, around the east and west coasts of Africa and back to Europe via the Atlantic.

The Pearls extension, unveiled in 2021, adds a branch that leaves the main ring near the Red Sea and sweeps through the Arabian Gulf and northern Arabian Sea. Planned landing points include Iraq; Kuwait; Bahrain; Qatar; the United Arab Emirates; Oman; the eastern coast of Saudi Arabia; and onward connections to Pakistan and India.

For Meta and its partners — including Vodafone, Orange, MTN’s Bayobab unit, Saudi operator center3 and state-owned Telecom Egypt — Pearls was intended to do two things at once: bring more capacity and competition to Gulf and South Asian markets, and create an alternative east-west route that does not depend solely on the crowded and politically sensitive Red Sea and Suez Canal corridor.

By late 2025, the main 2Africa ring around Africa was largely in place and being marketed as the world’s longest open-access subsea cable. Industry trackers and local announcements indicated that sections of Pearls were already manufactured and laid, with many of the remaining tasks focused on connecting the undersea segments to coastal landing stations and terrestrial backhaul networks.

Those final steps are now on hold.

A war spills into vital sea lanes

The security environment in which ASN is being asked to operate changed sharply at the end of February.

On Feb. 28, U.S. and Israeli forces launched large-scale strikes on Iran, including attacks that killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, according to U.S. officials. Tehran responded with a barrage of missile and drone strikes on U.S. bases and regional allies, and announced that it considered the Strait of Hormuz “closed” to hostile shipping.

While Iran’s declaration has no standing in international law, the practical impact has been severe. Since early March, international monitoring agencies and naval reports have documented dozens of attacks on merchant vessels in and around Hormuz and the northern Gulf, including missile and drone strikes on oil tankers and bulk carriers.

Major shipping lines have rerouted or halted traffic through the strait. War-risk insurers have imposed surcharges or withdrawn coverage for some voyages, and many crews have been granted hazard pay and the right to refuse assignments into the area.

At the same time, Iran and allied groups have broadened their targets beyond ships and oil facilities to include digital infrastructure on shore. In a statement this month, Amazon Web Services confirmed that several of its data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain were struck by drones.

“The attacks caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery to portions of the affected facilities and required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage,” AWS said, adding that it had to shift services to other regions while repairs were underway.

Missiles and drones have also hit refineries, liquefied natural gas terminals and desalination plants across the Gulf, underscoring Iran’s willingness to strike civilian infrastructure its leaders view as tied to U.S. and Israeli interests.

In that environment, cable-laying and repair vessels — large, slow ships that must trace precise paths as they spool fiber onto the seabed — would be conspicuous and potentially vulnerable targets.

ASN pulls back under state ownership

Alcatel Submarine Networks occupies a central role in the subsea cable industry. Along with a small group of rivals based in the United States, Japan and China, it designs and installs the high-capacity fiber systems that carry nearly all intercontinental internet traffic.

In January 2025, Nokia completed the sale of 80% of ASN to the French state, represented by the Agence des participations de l’État, keeping a minority stake and board representation for a transitional period. French officials framed the deal as a way to anchor a strategic digital infrastructure company in Europe and ensure secure supply for European carriers and cloud providers.

That state backing adds a political layer to what is, on its face, a commercial and safety decision. By allowing ASN to invoke force majeure and suspend work in the Gulf, Paris is effectively signaling that it is not prepared to expose a flagship infrastructure asset — or its crews — to the current level of military risk around Iran.

Neither ASN nor Meta has issued a detailed public statement about the pause. People involved in the project said the force-majeure declaration is intended as a suspension, not a cancellation, but acknowledged that there is no clear timeline for when security conditions might allow work to resume.

In practice, lawyers say, force majeure clauses in large infrastructure contracts typically stop the clock on performance obligations while leaving room for renegotiation over costs, schedules and possible route changes once the triggering event — in this case, war — abates.

Delayed redundancy at a fragile moment

The immediate effect of ASN’s decision is not to plunge any country into digital darkness. Gulf states and South Asian nations already connect to the global internet through an array of existing cables, including the SEA-ME-WE series, the Asia-Africa-Europe-1 system and regional networks.

But industry analysts say the delay comes at a particularly sensitive moment for network resilience.

In the past two years, multiple cables in the Red Sea have been damaged, with investigators pointing in at least one case to a drifting cargo ship that had been disabled by a missile strike off Yemen. Repairs there have been complicated by security concerns and access restrictions in one of the world’s most heavily trafficked shipping lanes.

The Pearls extension was meant in part to provide an alternative path for traffic that would otherwise have to cross the Red Sea and Egypt, long-standing chokepoints for data as well as trade. With both routes now facing elevated risk — the Red Sea from Houthi attacks, the Gulf from Iranian strikes — network operators have fewer options to reroute traffic in the event of outages.

For Gulf governments, the disruption also cuts against long-running efforts to position cities such as Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Riyadh as safe, neutral hubs for cloud computing and artificial intelligence. Even before the AWS incidents, authorities in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia had been courting hyperscale data centers with promises of political stability and robust infrastructure.

The attacks on data centers and the halted work on Pearls do not by themselves negate those efforts, but they add new questions for investors and cloud customers about the region’s exposure to conflict.

For African markets, the picture is mixed. The main 2Africa ring, which skirts the continent’s coasts, is proceeding toward service and is expected to significantly increase international bandwidth to dozens of countries, potentially lowering wholesale prices and improving reliability.

What is postponed, at least for now, is the full benefit of diversified, low-latency routes to South Asian and Gulf destinations that Pearls was designed to provide.

An old vulnerability in a new kind of war

The disruption to 2Africa’s Gulf extension fits into a wider pattern of stress on subsea infrastructure.

In the Mediterranean and Red Sea, a combination of accidental anchor drags, suspected sabotage and spillover from conflicts has damaged cables repeatedly over the past 15 years, periodically slowing internet service in the Middle East and South Asia. In northern Europe, cable faults near Norway, Svalbard and the Baltic Sea have prompted NATO governments to increase surveillance of ships operating near critical routes.

The 2026 Iran war has brought several of those risks together: hostile action against commercial shipping in a key chokepoint, direct attacks on cloud and energy facilities on land, and now the withdrawal — at least temporarily — of a major cable builder from an entire conflict-affected region.

For all the talk of “the cloud,” the vast majority of the world’s data still moves through fiber-optic strands laid on the ocean floor, following geography that was mapped for telegraph lines in the 19th century. In the 21st, those routes are increasingly shaped not just by seabed topography and demand forecasts, but by missile ranges and insurance exclusions.

In response, large technology companies are trying to redraw the map. Meta has already announced plans for a new, roughly 50,000-kilometer system dubbed Project Waterworth, which would connect five continents and is explicitly marketed as a way to add diversity and avoid single points of failure.

Whether those new routes can keep pace with the shifting lines of conflict is an open question. For now, thousands of kilometers of high-capacity cable intended to knit Africa, the Gulf and South Asia more closely together are in limbo, a reminder that the world’s most modern networks still run through some of its oldest and most contested waters.