Vietnam suffers three subsea cable outages

Three out of five of Vietnam’s international undersea cables are down, the country’s state media has confirmed.

The impacted cables include the Intra Asia (IA) connection to Singapore, the Asia Pacific Gateway (APG) link, and the Asia-Africa-Europe-1 (AAE-1) pipeline.

According to the Vietnam News Agency, it is especially difficult for internet users to access services that have servers located abroad, as the three cables connect Vietnam with the US, Europe and Asia. The problems have “significantly affected Vietnam’s internet connection with the world,” the news agency said.

It also reported that there has been no given timeframe for the cable repairs, which are notoriously slow to fix. A global shortage of repair ships and time spent identifying the damaged area(s) contribute to the delays.

Early last year, all five of the country’s submarine cables went down simultaneously. The cause of this still remains unclear, but the country was able to maintain most of its connectivity through terrestrial connections. This demonstrates the importance of having diversified connectivity routes.

In February, the country announced plans to invest in up to four more international telecommunications cables with a data capacity of 60 Tbps by 2025. Assuming all five of Vietnam’s existing cables are operational by the plan’s 2025 deadline, they will almost double the country’s undersea bandwidth to 122Tbps.