Internet in Vietnam Suffers as Three Out of Five Undersea Cables Fail
Internet connectivity in Vietnam has been hit as three out of its five undersea internet cables have failed. Find out more about the incident and its impact on internet services within the country.
- Three out of five of Vietnam’s undersea internet cables have failed, hurting internet services nationwide.
- The incident is the country’s second major internet outage in the past year when all five cables went down.
International internet connectivity to Vietnam has been disrupted. Three out of its five undersea internet cables failed around June 15, and two of them remain down even now. The three affected cables include the Asia Pacific Gateway (APG) link, the Intra Asia (IA) connection to Singapore, and the Asia-Africa-Europe-1 (AAE-1) pipeline.
So far, cable operators have yet to be advised of a timeline for when services are to be restored, especially since the process of fixing them is complex while ships specializing in cable repair are scarce. The cause of the failures has yet to be made clear, and sabotage seems unlikely. Degradation of the cables or damage by passing ships are also potential suspects, as similar incidents have occurred in the Red Sea and North Sea.
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This is the second time Vietnam has faced a similar issue in the past year. In 2023, all five of Vietnam’s cables failed, forcing the country to make temporary arrangements through land-based transmissions. At present, internet users are finding it challenging to access network services and websites that have servers in locations abroad.
The outages have come at a time when Vietnam is planning to expand its digital economy globally, using its VN country code top-level domain. The country is set to boost its bandwidth by 60Tbit/sec by 2025 to reach an undersea bandwidth of 122Tbit/sec. The current capacity is approximately 62 Tbps.
Until services are restored, internet service providers are expected to implement measures such as maximizing the use of land-based fiber optic cables and sharing traffic between international fiber optic lines.
The incident highlights the vulnerability of undersea cables with the recent outage in March across Kenya and Uganda following damage by shipping activities in the region. It also raises questions about the possibility of undersea cables becoming victim to international cyberwarfare in light of damage to cables in the Red Sea by Houthi rebels earlier this year.
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