Could Russia turn off the whole internet?

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It's Danielle O'Neill here.

Matt Bevan's on his way.

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A little after sunrise on Sunday, the 17th of November, a Chinese-owned cargo ship called the Yipeng-3 was inching its way across the Baltic Sea.

The ship was sailing southwest and it was moving unusually slowly, only six or seven knots, when it usually did 11 or 12.

Just after eight o'clock in the morning, it made a slight deviation from its course, a little shift westward.

At around nine o'clock, Yipeng-3 passed over the top of a submarine internet cable running between Lithuania and Sweden.

And just as the ship went over it, the cable snapped.

The ship continued on her way, still travelling very slowly.

18 hours later, she passed over another submarine internet cable, which runs between Germany and Finland.

Wouldn't you know it?

That one snapped too.

Internet speeds across northern Europe dipped and authorities began to scramble to figure out what was going on.

The German Defence Minister immediately thought it was sabotage.

As they tried to figure out who did the sabotage, Yipeng-3 stopped for an hour, bobbed about in the water for a bit, and then roared off at full speed.

Well, she's a cargo ship, so full speed isn't that fast, but way faster than she had been for the previous 24 hours.

It was almost as though the Yipeng-3 had been slowed down by something dragging behind her before pulling it back up onto the deck.

By that afternoon, it seems that someone figured out that Yipeng-3 might have had something to do with the submarine cables being cut and sent out an order to intercept her.

A Danish warship near Yipeng 3 did the naval equivalent of a handbrake turn and started shadowing her.

Looking closely, they would have seen a badly mangled starboard side anchor, the arms all bent out of shape, as though it had been dragged across hundreds of kilometres of seafloor.

Navy ships took turns following the Yipeng through the Danish archipelago before bringing her to a stop and boarding her.

Global media got quite excited.

The United States recently warned it had detected increased Russian military activity around key undersea cables.

The ship is not Russian, it's Chinese.

It will be responsible for my side to attribute this, let's say, incident or accident or whatever you want to call it, to anyone.

A week later, Yipeng 3 is still anchored in Danish waters under the watchful eye of their Coast Guard, as well as the Germans and Swedes.

Multiple countries have launched criminal investigations into how the cables broke and they are focusing on this cargo ship.

Now, this drama on the high seas may be news to you, but it's by no means the first time something like this has happened recently.

Similar events have seen cables cut in other parts of the ocean.

These incidents caused local disruptions to internet traffic, not global chaos.

But here's the thing:

there's serious concern that China and Russia are planning more of these attacks.

And the way the internet is set up, it wouldn't take many of them to cause serious problems.

So, today, how vulnerable is the internet to undersea sabotage?

And if a big global conflict were to break out, would the cables be the first casualty?

I'm Matt Bevan, and this is If You're Listening.

So, sabotaging cables is actually a much more common method of information warfare than I expected.

In fact, it goes back more than a 100 years.

The first shot was fired.

She hit us at 11,500 yards.

This is Ernie Boston, who was a 16-year-old boy in 1914 when he saw the first shot ever fired in combat at an Australian Navy ship.

Had that shell exploded, it would have killed most of the Bridge personal, including myself.

Ernie Boston was the captain's messenger on board the HMAS Sydney.

The ship shooting at the Sydney was the German ship SMS Emden.

World War I had started only a few months earlier and the thing they were fighting over was the Cocos Islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

The Emden had arrived there to destroy a telegraph station on the islands.

See, on the first day of World War I, literally within hours of Britain entering the war, the British Navy had sent a ship out into the English Channel to cut all of Germany's telegraph wires.

Germany had been using telegrams for decades to communicate with its colonies, its trading partners and its allies, and now it was forced to do all of that by radio instead, which could be easily intercepted by their enemies.

So cutting these wires was a big boon for the British, whose communications infrastructure was still intact.

Britain had built a telegraph cable network on the ocean floor, linking its entire empire.

They called it the all-red line.

It relied on repeater stations on tiny islands controlled by the empire, like the one on Cocos Islands.

The Emden was there to blow it up when it accidentally encountered HMAS Sydney.

Oops.

The quarterdeck gun fired the most rounds, 130 rounds,

and she set fire to the

after

part of the Emden.

The Sydney was not there to fornicate with Racknets.

The Emden at that time

was on fire from the mainmast right aft.

The Emden's funnel was shot away, a bridge shot away

and she was in a very, very bad mess.

Captain von Muller beached his ship on the islands to stop it from sinking.

Four Australians were killed compared with 133 Germans.

After the surviving Germans and their captain were taken prisoner, von Müller spoke to Ernie Boston.

And he said, it'll go hard for the fatherland if all dominions rally to their England like this.

It was hard for the fatherland, particularly without telegraph cables.

In times of war, you really don't want to have to shout your secret messages into a radio.

In 1917, Germany sent a message to Mexico asking for help and offering to give Mexico part of the United States if they won the war.

The British intercepted the message and showed it to the Americans, who really were not impressed.

This was a key ingredient in convincing the Americans to join the war, which was a key ingredient in Germany's defeat.

Cables were very important, and they were key to the war effort.

And it's tempting to think of this as a relic of World War I.

Our global communications have changed a lot since then.

Surely racing out hours after a war starts and snipping communications wire in 2024 would be ineffective.

Like responding by digging a trench or invading North Africa on horseback.

Satellites and the internet make all this redundant, right?

Well...

Again, there's this kind of misnomer out there that it's all zipping around on satellites and all this sort of thing, and that's not the case.

This is Guy Danskin, the boss of a company called Equinix, which runs internet data centers, and they basically run everything in our lives.

You only need to stand on a train commuting at the moment to see everyone head down, reading the news, looking at their phone, doing internet banking.

There's a lot of online shopping, I think, happening.

All of that requires data, requires security of data.

He is right that we think of the internet as zipping around on satellites and all that sort of thing, but there's actually a heap of physical infrastructure that makes it all work.

And almost none of that is in space.

In the Sydney suburb of Alexandria, Equinix alone has five physical data centers, big air-conditioned warehouses full of computer servers.

And inside one of those data centers is the Australian end of several submarine cables.

So physical cable lying on the ocean floor is what 99% of the world's internet traffic travels across today.

Australia has about a dozen of them connecting us with the rest of the world and they're not dissimilar to those lines being fought over back in World War I.

There is a network of several hundred cables crisscrossing the globe like a ball of wool.

And when they reach Australia, they mainly unspool in data centers in Sydney and Perth.

That's because as technology stepped up, we didn't really think of anything better than a wire on the ocean floor.

We just increased the capacity of the wire.

In 1963, undersea cables carried the first phone call between Australia and New Zealand.

Hello.

Mr.

Menzies.

Mr.

Hollyo to some of the eyes.

Go ahead, please.

Hello.

Hello, Bob.

Crowds gathered on both ends of the call.

It was a big event.

I have the great honour of declaring, on behalf of Australia this cable open.

I join warmly in declaring the cable officially open from the New Zealand end.

Prime Minister Keith Holyoke of New Zealand asked Australia's Bob Menzies how many people had gathered to see him make Australia's first international phone call.

A couple of hundred.

Menzies asked how many had gathered in Auckland.

I think a little more than a couple of hundred.

I must always just top Australia, Bob, mustn't I?

That's quite right.

A little more than 200, a very, very representative cable.

Oh, well, it's quality rather than quantity.

The cable between Australia and New Zealand was only part of the project.

Good.

Cheerio, Bob.

And I'll be seeing you later.

Remember me to dame Patty.

I will.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

A few months later, the link was extended across the Pacific, connecting Australia and New Zealand with Canada and the UK.

What time is it as a matter of interest now with you in the morning?

9:17.

And 11:15 in New Zealand, Alex.

And 6 o'clock in Ottawa and the snow is shining on the trees.

At the time, the Pacific cable could only carry 80 phone calls at a time, total.

Then, in the 80s, fiber optic cables were rolled out across the ocean floor.

They'll dramatically change the quality and extent of global communications.

And by the 90s, of course, they weren't just carrying phone calls.

Carrying a mixture of telephone, fax, computer data, and television signals around the world at the speed of light.

These days, those fiber optic cables come ashore at Khudge Beach and then run underground.

One of them runs under an outdoor gym in Neptune Park, another one under a picnic spot near Khudji Pavilion.

They run under the streets of Sydney's eastern suburbs to data centers like the ones that Guy Danskin runs in Alexandria.

And demand for capacity on those cables and in data centers is increasing all the time.

See, back in the day, and by that I mean like 2009, most internet traffic consisted of small files moving directly between a server and a user.

Now though, more and more of our lives are stored in the cloud.

And this means that the undersea cables are increasingly dominated by large files being transferred between data centers.

Not only are we sending more files and bigger files, but they're all traveling around the world via data centers in places like Finland or Ireland.

Companies like Equinix profit off all this by transferring and storing the data, but even for them, it's a bit of a worry.

The proliferation of data is actually a real challenge, particularly when you think about enterprises that have thousands of applications, tens of thousands of users, sometimes millions of customers.

And the problem is made worse by the fact that nobody ever deletes anything.

All of the 200 gigabytes of material that it took to make each episode of If You're Listening is just sitting archived in the cloud and that means it's sitting in a physical data center somewhere.

I'm Matt Bevan and this is America If You're Listening and the chance that that makes it to the final tape is very low.

How do you store that?

How do you secure it?

How long do you need to store it for?

What do you do with it when you don't need it?

You back off guy.

Those two-hour recording sessions from the early seasons of this show might come in handy one day.

And artificial intelligence is going to make this a whole lot worse.

We've only just started to explore how that technology could be used and already it's putting pressure on the system.

These are all pretty large-scale industrial challenges.

Now most of this data travels around on submarine cables about as thick as a can of tuna.

Remember when I said that the world was like a big ball of wool with hundreds of cables crisscrossing the globe?

Some of the wool is knotted.

It's tightly focused in vulnerable pinch points.

17 of the most important submarine cables in the world run through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal.

18 of them run through the South China Sea and the Strait of Malacca.

A half a dozen of those run through the highly contested geopolitical hotspot of Kuji Beach.

Cutting several of those cables at once would massively disrupt the global internet.

We have pipelines, we have communication cables like the internet, we have

just power lines running on the seabed, and it's very, very difficult to monitor what's going on and to prevent cases of sabotage.

And there have been cases of seabed sabotage.

Very famously in 2022 someone blew up the big gas pipeline linking Russia with Germany through the Baltic Sea.

We're still not entirely sure whom.

Last year, also in the Baltic Sea, a Chinese-owned ship dragged its anchor across a gas pipeline and an internet cable, cutting them.

China claims it was an accident, and the EU has been unable to prove otherwise.

And earlier this year, this happened.

We've seen a series of new attacks by Yemen's Houthi rebels targeting shipping in the Red Sea.

Iranian-backed militants in Yemen have been attacking cargo ships in what they say is a protest against Israel's invasion of Gaza.

Now, just recently we've seen the Houthis target a ship with missiles.

Missile hit and it forced the crew on board to abandon the ship.

The ship, with its anchor lowered, drifted around for a bit and then sank.

In that process, it severed three cables, temporarily knocking millions of Middle Eastern internet users offline.

But to cut enough cables to cause a global disruption, you can't just drag an anchor around the ocean and hope for the best.

You've got to know exactly where the cables are.

For security reasons, there are no perfectly detailed maps of all the cables on the bottom of the ocean, but it seems someone is trying to make one.

The Russian ship Yantar doesn't look like anything special.

Officially, it's a research vessel.

And that's pretty much what it looks like.

It wouldn't seem out of place in a nature documentary about scientists researching polar bears or giant squid, but it's not operated by scientists.

It's operated by the Russian Navy's Main Directorate of Deep Sea Research.

It can carry several small remote-controlled submarines.

Those submarines are useful for all sorts of things.

In 2017, they were sent out as part of an attempted rescue operation for the sunken Argentine submarine San Juan.

But since then, the Yanta has spent most of its time lurking around submarine cables.

An anonymous British Navy officer told the Scandinavian documentary series Putin's Shadow War that the purpose of the Yanta is to make a precise map of the sea floor.

Cables, pipelines.

Not only are they able to map the infrastructure, but they have built a fleet specifically to attack that infrastructure.

Lately, the Yantar has been particularly interested in the coast of Ireland.

Ireland is home to more than 80 big data centers for companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook.

They all base their European operations there for tax reasons and these data centers are now responsible for almost a quarter of Ireland's electricity usage.

They are a key hub for European cloud computing.

So if you are mapping internet infrastructure, it's an important piece of the puzzle.

The Yantar is often shadowed in its quest by NATO Navy vessels.

In 2020, Ireland accused Russia of sending spies there to scope out their submarine cable landing stations on their east and west coasts.

And last week, the Yantar was observed by the Irish and British navies near their submarine cables connecting Ireland to England.

They politely asked the Antar to leave.

They really do not want it lurking around those cables.

So it makes sense that earlier this month, when those cables in the Baltic Sea were cut, European officials cried sabotage.

The Chinese-owned Yipeng-3 had left a Russian port.

They couldn't point the finger directly at Russia, but they made it clear they thought there was something sus happening.

Like the German defense minister, who said the threat posed by Russia wasn't just a military one, but a hybrid one.

The Kremlin strongly dismissed suggestions it was involved at all, calling it absurd.

Next month though, Russia is planning to conduct a drill whereby they disconnect the entire country from the global internet.

Nobody else does this.

It seems to indicate to me that they're testing what would happen if the rest of the global internet were to break for some reason.

It's not obvious what's going on here with the lurking and the testing and the maybe accidental but probably deliberate cutting of cables.

And it's possible that someone, maybe Russia, maybe China, maybe both, just want to make us think twice about hassling them.

Don't mess with us if you want YouTube to keep working.

And like the international banking system and the trains and hospitals and

everything.

It could be a vague threat more than an actual plan, but I might just stock up on some DVDs, just in case.

If you're listening, is written by me, Matt Bevan.

Supervising producer is Jess O'Callaghan.

Audio production is by Anna John.

Next week, the International Criminal Court in The Hague has issued an arrest warrant for the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Etanyahu, charging him with war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Last year, they issued a similar arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

And yet, despite the fact that all sounds quite serious, there's absolutely no expectation that either man will see the inside of a courtroom.

Why is that?

Why is the International Criminal Court seemingly so toothless?

And can that be changed?

That's next on If you listen.

Hello, it's Sam Hawley here from ABC News Daily.

You may have noticed there's been a flurry of activity in Canberra as the government rushes to get a huge amount of legislation through the parliament before it rises at the end of the week.

So, what are the new laws and would they really help you?

Find our episode on the bills passing and failing on the ABC Listen App.