As I understand it, the problem is not so much that they have been damaged, but rather that they have been damaged inside the combat zone and so repair craft are not likely to enter the area, thus the damage will remain.

FYI, this cut happened last week, just took a while to get reported in mainstream media.

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/at-least-one-subs...

That whole region is full on conflict. Be prepared for more Internet links to be severed. Always better to double on Pacific, Atlantic plus Indian Ocean routes.

Is this related to the Meta outage?

Edit: answering myself here, but https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39605925 says that this actually happened a week ago but the media reports are just very delayed. Basically it is actually unrelated.

And suddenly most of the World discover that the Internet is "just a bunch of cables connected together".

I wonder if this is somehow related with meta's down.