The internet isn’t in a cloud. It’s 600 cables on the ocean floor, and a single one is about as thick as a garden hose.

July 23, 2026

By Kim Komando

This email exists because of a hose at the bottom of the ocean.

Not “the cloud.” Not satellites beaming your Netflix from space. The real internet is more than 600 submarine cables on the seafloor, over 1.5 million kilometers of them, carrying nearly every email and stock trade on Earth. Satellites? Well under 1% of that traffic.

🧵 They’re skinnier than you think

Near shore, cables are armored and buried. In the deep, each cable is about the width of a garden hose. Inside, the fibers are as thin as a human hair.

That hair carries your bank. Roughly $10 trillion in transactions crosses these cables every day. Your paycheck has been to the bottom of the Atlantic more times than Jacques Cousteau.

⚓ The things that break the internet

About 200 cable faults happen per year, and boats and anchors cause two-thirds. In late 2024, a cargo ship’s anchor dragged the seabed over 100 miles, cutting two Baltic cables. That’s not an oopsie. That’s a plow.

Shark damage? Mostly a myth. From 2007 to 2014, confirmed fish-bite faults totaled exactly zero. The internet’s apex predator is a guy with an anchor.

When a cable breaks, a ship drags up the ends, crews splice them by hand and lower the cable back down. The whole planet has about 60 cable ships, less than 20 for repairs. The internet running your bank and before-bed FaceTime is maintained by a crew smaller than some school districts.

🛰️ Doesn’t Starlink fix all this?

Fair question, friend. Short answer: Nope.

More than 10,000 Starlink satellites are up there, over half of all satellites ever launched. When a cable gets cut, they’re a real lifeline. They kept Ukraine online when the wires got bombed.

But a lifeline isn’t the main line. Every satellite from every company adds up to about 50 terabits per second. The cables? Around 8,750. One modern cable beats the entire Starlink fleet combined.

Here’s the kicker: Even satellites don’t escape the hoses. Those signals have to land somewhere, and the ground stations plug into fiber. The same fiber. Space handles the last few miles. The ocean does the heavy lifting. Starlink’s a spare tire, not a new car.

It’s not surprising that the internet goes down sometimes. But it’s downright miraculous that it all runs on a hair inside a hose at the bottom of the sea. World Wide Web? Friend, it’s the World Wide Wet.

🎯 Send this to someone who thinks their photos live in a fluffy white cloud.

📱 Text-worthy: 99% of the internet travels through ~600 garden-hose-size cables on the OCEAN FLOOR. $10 trillion/day rides them. And sharks aren’t the problem, boat anchors are.