Major Undersea Cable Severed Off Taiwan, Causing Regional Outages
| An anchor incident damages a critical subsea fiber optic cable, leading to significant internet disruption across Southeast Asia.
Services Diverted After Cable Break
An international consortium of telecom providers confirmed today that a major subsea fiber optic cable, the Asia Pacific Gateway (APG), was severed in two places approximately 50 kilometers off the coast of Taiwan. Initial assessments point toward accidental damage caused by a drifting commercial vessel’s anchor during a recent storm.
The cable damage has immediately impacted internet speeds and services across several major Asian economies, including Singapore, Hong Kong, Vietnam, and the Philippines. While most large carriers have successfully diverted traffic to backup cables (like the SJC2 and AAE-1 systems), users are reporting intermittent packet loss and slower load times during peak hours.
“This incident highlights the extreme vulnerability of the global internet’s physical layer,” noted Dr. Kenji Ito, a telecommunications professor in Tokyo. “While redundancy exists, a dual-point failure on a major artery always creates bottlenecks.”
Repair ships have been dispatched, but the complex task of locating, retrieving, and splicing the cable segments is expected to take at least six to eight weeks, depending on favorable weather conditions.