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The dire situation in Yemen has just worsened after a mysterious internet blackout occurred early this morning, November 10. Web monitoring services NetBlocks and CloudFlare have reported the outage however, no explanation has yet been offered for its cause.
Representatives from Yemen’s telecommunications officials and the Iran-backed Houthi rebels have yet to comment on the matter, leaving many questions unanswered.
Foreign media: Yemen's main internet network has collapsed
According to the AP report, a central Internet network in Yemen under Houthi control crashed overnight & 10M users were disconnected.
Some believe the Internet crash came after the attacks on Israel & the United States pic.twitter.com/oKo7YzMtJn
— Shiri_Sabra (@sabra_the) November 10, 2023
This is not the first time Yemen’s internet access has been disrupted; back in January of 2022, a telecommunications building located in Hodeida was destroyed by airstrikes from Saudi forces fighting against the Houthis. There have been no reports yet of similar attacks this time around, so it remains uncertain as to what exactly caused today’s blackout.
Yemen relies heavily on an undersea FALCON cable which carries internet into their country through two ports: one located along the Red Sea in Hodeida and another based far east near Ghaydah. The majority of Yemen’s population live close to the Red Sea port, meaning that most of them are affected by this outage.
Unfortunately, GCX, who runs this cable system have not responded to requests for comment on the issue at hand.
Adding more fuel to an already chaotic fire is a series of recent drone and missile attacks carried out by Houthi rebels targeting Israel amid its campaign against Hamas in Gaza Strip.
This includes what was claimed to be an attack on Thursday aimed towards Eilat along the Red Sea coast line – followed up with an American MQ-9 Reaper drone being shot down earlier this week with a surface-to-air missile – sparking fears about possible regional war outbreak.
This is a developing story.
