Nobody's watching what's beneath the Strait of Hormuz

 Sean Baggett>

Everyone’s watching the Strait of Hormuz for oil tankers. Nobody’s watching what’s on the ocean floor beneath it. They should be because Iran just made a move that could affect every person on earth with a phone, a bank account, or a job.

🧵Quick geography lesson most people never learned. 97% of the world’s internet doesn’t travel through satellites. It travels through fiber-optic cables laid on the ocean floor.
Cables thinner than a garden hose carrying the entirety of global communication, finance, and commerce. There are seven of them running through the Strait of Hormuz.

🧵Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, the IRGC, just declared sovereignty over all seven of those cables. Their demand is foreign operators must obtain Iranian permits to maintain infrastructure on the seabed.. Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Google. All of them would be required to pay “protection fees” to the IRGC just to keep the internet running through the Strait. That’s not a metaphor. That’s the literal demand.

🧵To understand why this matters, you need to understand what moves through those cables daily.
☑️ $10 trillion in global financial transactions.
☑️ Every wire transfer.
☑️ Every stock trade.
☑️ Every international payment.
☑️ Every email.
☑️ Every cloud backup.
☑️ Every video call.
All of it pulsing through fiber-optic lines sitting on the floor of a war zone

🧵Here’s what makes this genuinely terrifying. On April 22, weeks before this announcement, Iranian state media began publishing detailed maps.. cable routes, landing stations and regional data hubs across the Persian Gulf.
Analysts who study infrastructure warfare have one two words for publishing that kind of detail in the middle of a conflict. Those two words are target preparation

🧵If you think Iran wouldn’t follow through, look at the Houthis in the Red Sea. In early 2024, Houthi leadership circulated a plan to target undersea cables there. People dismissed it, then they cut them. Cable repair ships cannot enter active conflict zones. Regions went partially offline for weeks. Iran has been watching and taking notes

🧵So what does actual cable disruption look like in practice? It’s not a clean outage. It’s degradation.. slower speeds, rerouted traffic, cascading failures across interconnected systems. Financial markets freeze or slow, banking systems in exposed regions fail to clear transactions, supply chain software goes dark, and the most vulnerable countries aren’t the US or Europe. They’re Jordan, Lebanon, Bangladesh, Singapore, South Korea and India.

🧵Hundreds of millions of people with no backup infrastructure. Here’s the part that should make Washington pay attention. The US military’s own logistics and communications in the region run partially through commercial cable infrastructure. This isn’t just economic warfare. It’s a potential military blind spot sitting in plain sight on the ocean floor.

🧵Last night, Trump called Iran’s ceasefire counter-proposal “totally unacceptable.”
Iran’s proposal included recognition of Strait of Hormuz sovereignty. The cables sit in the Strait. Tehran isn’t just asking for a ceasefire, they’re asking for control of the world’s digital throat, and they already have their hand around it.

This is what modern warfare looks like.. not just missiles and tankers, but Infrastructure, leverage and chokepoints. Oil was the weapon of the 20th century. Data is the weapon of the 21st, and right now, Iran is sitting on top of both.
Stay locked in. This is developing, and we’re watching.
Without borders.
Even here.
Even now.