Authorities of whom, the tweet is lacking a source or even information about the accident. Not to mention jumping to a terrorism case without any other details.
Yeah I don't think I'd call it terrorism by any reasonable definition. An act of aggression certainly but increasing latency/decreasing bandwidth due to a set of lost links is not by any means terrorism.
Nobody was physically harmed and it shouldn't have any real effect on essential or life preserving services (unless those services are incredibly poorly designed at which point the developers/maintainers should be held at fault).
But it is a terrorism. By cutting cables you literally can decimate the whole international network for a bunch of countries. Basically for example cut the access to any server outside of intranet.
Terrorism[1] is committing crime for political purposes, rather then for personal gain, and this definition is well recognized.
Terrorism has never been exclusively categorized as mass casualty attacks (and that's a relatively recent phenomenon, compared to the 70s and 80s with hijackings).
Terrorism is when people use terror for political purposes. While it is often synonymous with crime, the "terror" part is rather critical. Most often, the terror is over the target's personal safety, or that of the target's loved ones.
Having an undersea cable cut does not terrify a sane person without extenuating circumstances. Therefore it may be an act of war, but it is not terrorism in the slightest.
Redefining "terrorism" for the purposes of treating lesser criminals under harsh terrorism laws is unethical, immoral, unjust, and downright awful.
So if someone blows up a transformer substation, but no one dies, is that terrorism?
What about a building? A government office? An empty school?
Or here's a better question: what then do you call the use of criminal means, for political purposes, to gain compliance from local population and political authorities, when it doesn't include direct harm against humans and focuses on destruction of property?
Terrorism is acts to instil fear for political ends. Intent matters. If someone blows up a building to make people fearful, then it's terrorism. If someone does it to destroy someone's property, then its vandalism. By your logic, striking and blocking scabs is terrorism.
And so in the current moment, why do you think the Houthis (if they are indeed responsible, but let's assume so for the sake of this argument) are cutting submarine cables?
Why are you bullshitting people? Straight from your referenced link:
"The calculated use of violence or threat of violence to inculcate fear. Terrorism is intended to coerce or intimidate governments or societies in the pursuit of goals that are generally political, religious, or ideological."
Objectively intended to coerce or intimidate governments: do as you're told if you want to have a viable economy, because so much of today's economy relies on communication.
"to inculcate fear" is an essential part of that definition. Using bombers to drop bombs on a sleeping city is terrorism. Dropping bombs onto an undersea cable is not.
I mean, cutting cables is a violent act, property destruction is violence. Unless we're going to go with the weird reddit anarchist definition in which you can destroy whole structures and it isn't violence if nobody gets hurt because property isn't real, man
https://gulfif.org/the-next-casualty-of-the-red-sea-attacks-...
What's the practical effect of this? Other than some inconvenient latency and decreased redundancy...not as much as the headlines suggested?