When Submarine Cables Go Dark: Understanding and Preparing for the Risks of Taiwan's International Internet Disconnection
5 points by 7tehdt3cnw6kir6o
5 points by 7tehdt3cnw6kir6o
Based on a quick read-through, it's a very topical and down-to-earth paper. I'm not sure why it is (edit: or was?) flagged.
Thank you, I'll read it properly later! While Taiwan's situation is obviously a bit extreme, I'm pretty sure there's a lot to learn for everybody.
While Taiwan's situation is obviously a bit extreme, I'm pretty sure there's a lot to learn for everybody.
Internet blackouts and censorship are sadly becoming more and more common around the world, and as one blogger in Iran put it while experiencing one:
Many of our software are built on top of the assumption of good, stable, high speed connectivity, up to date hardware and the ability to babysit, update and fix the software constantly. In bad situations like this, you don't have any of this. You might go months without being connected to the internet, you might have to use decades old hardware, and the software should be reliable enough so you don't have to constantly babysit it.
An internet blackout where your own government will crack down on connecting to the outside world is also a rather extreme situation compared to not being able to load a bloated react app on a 2G connection or from Antarctica, but the point remains that much of the software we rely on is quite bandwidth and compute hungry.
But most orgs, outside of governmental intervention, are not incentivized to care about things like this. I feel there are some individual efforts that could be very helpful (having one's own simplified search engine like ~technomancy does instead of just solely relying on google for example), but if everyone's insistent on running critical comms through WhatsApp or Line or Facebook Messenger which go down with the submarine cables / us-east-1 outage, there's not really much you can do.
The paper mentions this site a few times, but it may be interesting to highlight it: 「台灣海纜動態地圖」 (“Live State of Taiwan Undersea Cables”)
The paper mentions:
Submarine cables are multi-layer cables a few centimeters thick on the seabed, or buried one to three meters in shallow water. In busy shallow areas such as the Taiwan Strait, damage often comes from human activity—anchoring, fishing, dredging—and from natural wear, amplifier failure, earthquakes, landslides, and geopolitical risk. Human causes dominate cable damage in Taiwan.
I think the author is purposefully avoiding the additional context that many of the recent incidents of cable damage are widely believed to have been intentional—part of the so-called “grey zone” strategic efforts: 《台灣海底電纜首宗刑事案：中國籍船長判囚三年，庭上細節能釋除北京「灰色作戰」疑雲嗎？》 In the first criminal case involving Taiwan Undersea Cables, wherein a Chinese national ship captain has been sentenced to three years in prison, do details of the case dispel notions of Beijing involvement in “Grey Zone” strategic efforts? (July 2025)
As a result, there are now “resiliency drills” that reduce or disrupt telecommunications as a preparatory measure, though the scope seems to be somewhat limited—「2026城鎮韌性演習首納行動「斷網」 8/10中部、8/13北部 影響範圍一次看」 (“A Quick Look at the Affected Scope of Internet Disruption in the Upcoming 2026 Resiliency Drill”):
國安官員強調，此次降速演習只影響4G、5G公眾行動網路，家用固網、室內Wi-Fi、室內電話均不受影響；金融及交通方面，ATM是透過實體網路運作，交通號誌也有獨立網路，均可正常運作；民眾使用感應式支付結帳，後端交易若透過商家固網，原則上也不受影響。不過，若使用手機4G、5G進行網路下單、上傳身分證件或即時金融交易，可能受到影響，建議避開演習時段，或是改用固網、Wi-Fi。
Public security officials stress: the speed reduction activity will only affect 4G and 5G internet connections, but home wired internet connections, indoor Wi-Fi, and home telephone will not be affected. Financial and transportation systems (e.g., ATMs and traffic signals) should be operating normally. Payment mechanisms (e.g., tap-to-pay,) should not, in principle, be affected if they are using in-store wired connections; however, 4G and 5G internet payment mechanisms will be affected, as may online identity verification and real-time financial trading systems. …
Funnily enough I posted about a previous resiliency drill here: https://lobste.rs/s/ut3ncn/measuring_taiwan_s_mobile_slowdown_with. Thread unfortunately didn't get any discussion :(
That's an interesting post. Thank you for sharing!
Do you have any on-the-ground reflections on the resiliency drill and how it affected systems you administrate? (How useful of an exercise was this? What changes could be made to make the next such exercise more useful?)
Oh I'm not Taiwanese lol, I just shared these posts cuz I have a general interest in the topic. Managing systems / research / communicating under limited connectivity is something I ruminate on regularly, but don't really drill outside of experimenting a bit with offline knowledge bases such as kiwix or devdocs.