We consider a non-uniformly elliptic second-order differential operator with periodic coefficients that models composite media consisting of highly anisotropic cylindrical fibres periodically distributed in an isotropic background. The degree of anisotropy is related to the period of the coefficients via a ‘critical’ high-contrast scaling. In particular, ellipticity is lost in certain directions as the period, \(\varepsilon \) , tends to zero. Our primary interest is in the asymptotic behaviour of the resolvent of this operator in the limit of small \(\varepsilon \) . Two-scale resolvent convergence results were established for such operators in Cherednichenko et al. in (Proc Royal Soc Edinb: Sect A Math 136(1):87–114, 2006, [2]). In this work, we provide an asymptotic description of the resolvent and establish operator-type error estimates. Our approach adopts the general scheme of Cooper et al. (Quantitative multiscale operator-type approximations for asymptotically degenerating spectral problems, [4]) However, we face new challenges such as a directional dependence on the loss of ellipticity in addition to a key ‘spectral gap’ assumption of the above article only holding in a weaker sense. This results in additional ‘interfacial’ boundary layer analysis in the vicinity of each fibre to arrive at order- \(\varepsilon \) operator-type error estimates.