Multiple long-haul fiber cables cut around Marseille

During the night of 19 to 20 October 2022, multiple long-haul fibre-optic backbone cables were severed at several locations on the outskirts of Marseille, a major internet hub where subsea cables connecting Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas come ashore. At least three terrestrial routes radiating from the city were affected, linking Marseille to Lyon, to Milan and to Barcelona. The simultaneous cuts at multiple sites degraded connectivity well beyond France: monitoring and security firms reported packet loss, increased latency and rerouting affecting traffic between Europe, Asia and the United States, with one severed link first observed late on 19 October and the disruption resolved on 20 October.

The French internet provider Free said repair crews were mobilised before dawn to address what it described as an act of vandalism against its fibre infrastructure, carried out simultaneously at several points near Marseille; images shared by the company showed cables cleanly cut inside their concrete housings. French judicial police opened an investigation into the multiple breakages on the city's outskirts. As reported by DataCenterDynamics and Seattle Times (Associated Press), the cuts resembled an earlier 2022 episode and were treated as deliberate damage, though no perpetrator was identified and no group claimed responsibility. According to BleepingComputer, security and cloud-routing providers adjusted traffic paths to limit the impact while repairs proceeded.

The Marseille cuts were the second major fibre-sabotage incident in France in 2022, following coordinated cable cuts around Paris in April. Both shared a similar signature: multiple backbone cables severed simultaneously at separate sites inside protective housings, consistent with deliberate action rather than accident. No actor was ever publicly identified, no claim of responsibility emerged, and authorities did not attribute the attacks to any state. Targeting Marseille, one of the world's most important cable landing points, illustrates how striking a single chokepoint can ripple across multiple countries and continents, underscoring the fragility of critical communications infrastructure.