Three of Vietnam's five undersea internet cables are down
reuters.com
reuters.com
Judging by this map:
https://www.fiberatlantic.com/
Three cables are connected to the city of Vūng Tàu, and the other two are further north. So there's probably a central point of failure in Vūng Tàu that gave out.
It's the AAE-1 (Vung Tau), TGN-IA (Vung Tau), and APG (Da Nang) that are down.
Also, this happens all the time to VN because the southern portion of that Sea has heavy traffic from freight shippers, oil drilling vessels, fishing fleets, and ofc naval deployments. If you're ever flying from HK to ASEAN over the SCS on a clear day, it's a treat seeing all the ships relatively jam packed as far as the eye can see.
Saigon Port and neighboring Vung Tau Port are themselves the busiest and 3rd busiest ports in VN. Most likely a freighter hit a single point of failure.
VN has relatively few (5) undersea internet cables for the size of market it is (eg. Thailand has 8 cables, PH has 17, Myanmar has 4, Cambodia 3) and most are newish (last 15 years), but there are like 3-4 new undersea cable projects that should come online within the next year.
Edit: AAE-1 has been down for months now because the MV Rubymar was hit by a Houthi missile and sank in the Red Sea cutting that and multiple other cables.
In reality it's most likely a freighter that cut the TGN-IA and APG.
Those maps are shit. They are London tube style and don't display anything useful, not even bandwidth let alone locations. They are worse than London tube.
Only one cable was cut recently (IA) - mid last week.
(APG) - March 10, (AAE-1) - May 23
I know of nothing better.
It's just important to actually think about what graphs are showing you. In this case it's just pretty lines for a picture on the wall. Without bandwidth there's nothing you can tell.
The physical locations will be kept secret, they would be found with OSINT but it's of limited use outside of terrorism.
The bandwidth and lag is something of interest. I would be great to know how the data flows throughout the world. I wish some researcher at a university did this. What's data flow like between Lagos and Mexico City?
Clifford Stoll napkin mathed where the hackers came from in The Cookoo Egg using lag. I always thought that was cool.
“The hacker’s signals might be traveling through a satellite link. It takes a quarter second for microwaves to travel from earth to the satellite and back.” Communications satellites orbit twenty-three thousand miles over the equator.
“Yeah, that’s one reason,” Lloyd said. “But you’d need twelve satellite hops to account for that three-second delay. What’s the real reason for the delay?”
“Maybe the hacker has a slow computer.”
“Not that slow. Though maybe the hacker has programmed his Kermit to respond slowly. That’s reason two.”
“Aah! I know the third delay. The hacker’s using networks that move his data inside of packets. His packets are constantly being rerouted, assembled, and disassembled. Every time they pass through another node, it slows him down.”
“Exactly. Unless you can count the number of nodes, you can’t tell how far away he is. In other words, ‘You lose.’ ” Lloyd yawned and returned to repairing a terminal.One day I walked into Borders and bought The Cuckoo's Egg. I devoured it. I knew immediately that I wanted to be a programmer.
So I went back to Borders and bought a book on Python.
Sorry... i'll show myself out
> Undersea internet cable problems are not rare in Vietnam, which early last year saw all of its five cables disrupted for weeks.
Tons of area to effect a break, and only need to break at a single point.
Attribution is difficult due to most of the sea being unwatched by most countries.
Economic impact, so less likely to result in escalation even if attributed.
Commercial shipping breaks cables all the time, so excellent plausible deniability.
End result: "a shame if something happened" situations like that Russian trawler doing back and forths across a Norwegian link.
Or as other commenters say, all three cables terminate in one city, so it could be a problem there.
Another possibility is that these cables provided an ideal training environment to test the capabilities of an adversary to cut off a region from the rest of the world. I'd think an adversary in wartime would cut all 5 cables. Vietnam could be the victim of an aggressor who just wants to practice/prove capabilities without much fear of repercussions.
I don't know who would benefit from crippling Vietnam's internet infrastructure today, but it could still benefit another nation to see/prove that it could.
Which is just code for “the government is doing it intentionally”.
These “problems” seem to coincide with major political events.