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Yemen went offline early Friday after Saudi-led airstrikes hit a location in the contested city of Hodeida, according to an advocacy group. According to NetBlocks, the outage began at 1 a.m. local time and impacted TeleYemen, the country’s state-owned monopoly in charge of internet access. The Houthi rebels, who have been in control of Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, since late 2014, now manage TeleYemen.
Yemen was “in the midst of a nationwide internet blackout as a result of an airstrike on a telecom building,” according to NetBlocks. A statewide outage affecting Yemen began about the same time, according to the Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis, based in San Diego.
The Saudi-led coalition fighting the Houthi rebels in Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, admitted to conducting “precise airstrikes to damage the militia’s capabilities” near Hodeida’s port. It did not immediately accept striking a telecommunications target, as stated by NetBlocks, instead describing Hodeida as a centre for piracy and Iranian arms smuggling to support the Houthis.
TeleYemen uses the undersea FALCON cable to bring internet into Yemen via the Hodeida port in the Red Sea. The FALCON cable also has a landing in Ghaydah, Yemen’s far eastern port, but the majority of the country’s population lives near the Red Sea to the west.
In 2020, a ship’s anchor cut the FALCON cable, causing major internet outages in Yemen. TeleYemen previously stated that land cables to Saudi Arabia had been cut since the commencement of Yemen’s civil war, and that connections to two other undersea cables have yet to be built due to the fighting.
In 2015, a Saudi-led coalition entered Yemen’s conflict to support the country’s deposed government. With international criticism of Saudi airstrikes murdering civilians and destroying the country’s infrastructure, the war has developed into the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis. Meanwhile, the Houthis have used juvenile troops and have strewn landmines around the country.
On Monday, the war reached the United Arab Emirates, a Saudi ally, when the Houthis claimed responsibility for a drone and missile strike on Abu Dhabi, which killed three people and injured six more.
