This week, Singapore will host the world’s largest gathering of experts in the field of undersea data cables when more than 1,000 will meet for the annual Submarine Networks World conference.

The cables that crisscross the ocean floor and connect our digital economy are under growing threat.

Most of the time, subsea cables are out of sight, out of mind. But, “subsea cables really drive the global economy,” said Mike Constable, a cable consultant with Infra-Analytics.

More than 95% of internet traffic passes through theses wires. Not to mention “around $10 trillion worth of financial transactions, a race around the world every day,” Constable said.

But many of the cables carrying all that money are just laying there on the seabed or right beneath it; sometimes, they get snipped. Usually, it’s an accident, Constable said.

“Primarily fishing,” he said. “Damage from anchors is quite a significant one as well, so together they make up around 80% of all problems we have.”

Other culprits include nature. Think: underwater rock slides. But there’s a growing concern about state-sponsored sabotage.

“Look, lots of things can go wrong with a network as big as this,” said Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, now at Harvard. “But the focus is, of course, state actors such as Russia, essentially trying to cut the wires.”

European authorities have accused Russia of cutting cables in the Baltic Sea. This highlights a fundamental challenge in protecting the network, per Kevin Frazier, a technology researcher at UT Austin. The cables provide a public good.

But “the vast majority are owned by private companies,” he said. “Those hyperscalers, we've become all the more familiar with — Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta.”

Frazier added that governments can be doing more to make sure those wires stay intact. “The lowest-hanging fruit is merely reducing the odds of people going near these cables.”

Some governments keep ships away from data cables, he said. But that’s not always feasible in high-traffic areas, like the Eastern Seaboard. The solution there is redundancy.

“This is just laying more cables, right?” Frazier said. “We have about 600 cables right now, and I think we need to drastically increase the number of cables.”

That way, web traffic can be rerouted if cables get cut. Mike Constable of Infra-Analytics noted that some outages are inevitable, so it’s time to build more ships ready to fix them.

“While we're investing billions into new cable networks, we aren't balancing that investment into the ships that look after those cable networks,” he said.

There are just a few dozen cable repair ships worldwide for nearly a million miles of undersea cable, Constable added.