The Associated Press reported - today, Tuesday - that three marine communications cables passing through the waters of the Red Sea were cut, amid talk of damage that struck the Facebook and Instagram platforms.

Quoting unnamed officials, the agency explained that 3 international cables that pass through the Red Sea and provide Internet and communications around the world were cut off - yesterday - without indicating who was responsible for that.

Quoting a statement from Hong Kong-based HGC Global Communications, the Associated Press said that the cut cables include the “Asia-Africa-Europe 1” cable, the “Europe-India” cable, and the “Secom TGN Golf” cable.

The company stated that the cable outage affected 25% of the data flow through the Red Sea cable, which it said was “important” for the flow of data from Asia to Europe. It also said that it had begun redirecting data traffic, without indicating who was responsible for the outage.

At the same time, thousands of users of Meta's Facebook and Instagram platforms reported problems affecting their accounts on the two platforms.

According to the Downdetector website, more than 300,000 reports of service outages were submitted to Facebook, and more than 20,000 reports were filed by Instagram users.

In its first comment, Meta said that it was investigating cases of Facebook and Instagram service outages.

Houthi exiled

A few days ago, the Houthi group denied allegations in the Israeli media that they had targeted marine cables, stressing that it was avoiding harming any cables in the Red Sea.

In support of the Palestinian resistance since the escalation of the war on Gaza, the Houthis have been targeting ships owned or operated by Israeli companies or individuals or transporting goods to and from Israel. They have expanded their attacks to include American and British ships following the start of raids on Yemen last January.

The Israeli Globes claimed that the Houthis damaged 4 communications cables in the Red Sea between Jeddah and Djibouti, and that repairing them may take at least 8 weeks according to estimates.

The newspaper added that the incident caused a major disruption in Internet communications between Europe and Asia, but the main damage was in the Gulf countries and India.