Vietnam Hit By Widespread Internet Disruption After Undersea Cables Fail

Vietnam News Agency reports three of Vietnam’s five international undersea internet cables are down to start the week, sparking major internet outages. This is the country’s second major outage in just over a year.

The Intra Asia (IA) cable had an incident on its S1 branch connecting to Singapore while problems on the Asia Pacific Gateway (APG) and the Asia-Africa-Europe-1 (AAE-1) have not been fixed yet.

The failure of the three cable systems has seriously affected the speed of Vietnam’s international internet connections, with internet users having found it difficult to access websites and network services with servers abroad. -VNA 

Vietnam is primarily connected to the world through five submarine fiber optic cables: APG, IA, AAE-1, Asia-America Gateway (AAG), and Southeast Asia-Middle East-Western Europe (SMW-3). 

VNA said internet service providers nationwide have “rolled out various measures to ensure internet connections for users, including sharing traffic between internationally connected fiber optic lines and capitalizing on fiber optic cables on land.”

The local media outlet did not specify what caused the incident nor provided a timeline for repairs.

While we don’t want to speculate on potential sabotage, earlier this year, reports emerged suggesting that Iran-backed Houthis might have severed internet cables in the Red Sea.

About a month ago, US State Department officials told a team of Wall Street Journal reporters about the increasing risks that undersea cables could be susceptible to sabotage via Chinese ships amid territorial disputes in the South China Sea.