
ACE Submarine Cable Cut Impacts Ten Countries - ohjeez
https://dyn.com/blog/ace-submarine-cable-cut-impacts-ten-countries/
======
dschuetz
Internet down for just 2 days - "Huge African Internet Outage"

Still no power in many network blocks in Puerto Rico after months - SNAFU

EDIT: Thanks for the title edit! It's more accurate that way.

~~~
RightMillennial
This internet outage looks like it affects 22 countries (some more than
others) and covers a much more expansive area. I don't mean to detract from
the tragedy in Puerto Rico but these events aren't comparable because their
causes are completely different.

~~~
dschuetz
I disagree. No power for months is quite a bit worse than 2 days without the
Internet, no matter what the scale or the cause is. 100k people without power
is far worse than 100k or 1M without Internet.

On the scale of Internet outages, I agree, it's a whopper. Potentially
affecting two dozens of African countries even just for 2 days is a big deal.
It's still less important than several hundreds of thousands of people not
having power for months. Which is reeeaaally bad. It blows my mind, actually,
that such a thing is even possible on US territory.

~~~
RightMillennial
I didn't mean this internet outage is worse than the Puerto Rico situation.
That's why I said they're not comparable. The expanse of the internet outage
is simply what makes it news worthy.

~~~
Spare_account
Also the novelty, it is a recent event. Puerto Rico's event has been happening
for a while and is therefore less likely to be headline news.

~~~
rovr138
It's still hard back in PR. They're showing Power generation and usage
statistics. They're not showing how many houses/businesses are really up.

While things are better, they're not great.

My mom is leaving her house open and our family further away and people she
know that they can show up and load the washer and dryer. My grandpa brought
his washer from his house. So that's 2 washers, 1 dryer running almost all day
long. She's spending almost $200 more a month in power than she used to.

So Percent of Power Generation or Percent of Power Usage != Percent of People
connected.

------
rb808
I'm curious how vulnerable these under sea cables are. IE if there was a war,
surely a few subs could snip a dozen cables and break the internet into
pieces. Is that wrong?

~~~
msl
Submarine cables have actually been tapped in the past, so cutting them should
not be much of a challenge. Blind Man's Bluff [1] is a book about this kind of
thing (and all sorts of weird things that involve intelligence operations
performed with submarines). It is one of those books that would not work if it
were fiction: too unrealistic.

[1]
[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42343.Blind_Man_s_Bluff](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42343.Blind_Man_s_Bluff)

~~~
froindt
I have a buddy who is working on a sub. He couldn't really say what he was
doing with much detail, but recommended this book. He says it contains a lot
of secret info which was acquired by the author basically becoming friends
with lots of submariners and them over time mentioning things.

I haven't read it yet, but it's on my list.

~~~
walrus01
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Jimmy_Carter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Jimmy_Carter)

it's been modified to do _something_ interesting, though whether that involves
messing with the russian version of the SOSUS network, or tapping undersea
fiber cables, is certainly classified at a very high level.

~~~
Declanomous
Kind of ironic considering Carter has a Nobel Peace Prize.

~~~
walrus01
Not really - he was a submarine nuke engineer before going into politics.

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lordnacho
The scale sounds big, but isn't this kind of thing routine? I've had a line
across the Channel that kept getting cut. You'd get this series of emails
(more like a dozen):

\- Investigating outage

\- Cable ship being provisioned

\- Cable ship sailing to site

\- Cable spliced

\- Back online

Pretty annoying when it happens, but it seemed to me like there was a whole
infrastructure to deal with cable snaps.

~~~
rb808
Nice to have someone

> Cable spliced

How does that happen, is there a submersible that goes down or is the cable
hoisted up? It doesn't sound trivial.

~~~
jquinby
They haul it up:
[http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/recycled/200...](http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/recycled/2008/02/how_do_you_fix_an_undersea_cable.html)

~~~
regnerba
An awesome and surprising answer to a question I didn't know I had... Thanks
for sharing that!

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filleduchaos
Hey, this hit me! Really annoying, especially since it was over the Easter
weekend so getting a backup provider was next to impossible. I ended up having
to manage my phone's data plan.

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walrus01
the business plans for how cables are financed have changed significantly
since this was published, but the actual construction work is much the same.

[https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/](https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/)

~~~
gkanai
That URL is 404 atm.

Stephenson's "Mother Earth, Mother Board" is the longest article in Wired
afaik. It is a masterpiece.

------
ShakataGaNai
For those that care about this sort of thing on a regular basis, are there any
services that publish cable cuts/large scale outage information? It'd be
terribly useful find out about major internet events on a more consistent
basis.

I see mentions of "Oracle Internet Intelligence" but not any sort of product
behind it. One of their other blog entries mentions Akamai mPulse which is
more performance based than outages (though it can be useful).

~~~
walrus01
dyn is primarily concerned with the internet at OSI layer 3: they are tracking
the number of prefixes announced, from which particular ASes, and the impact
that cuts, political interference and other events have on the global BGP
routing table.

they have considerably less of a view into what's going on at layer 1. What it
looks like from their post is that if the cable is actually cut north of
sierra leone, that a protection system was activated and traffic was re-routed
via cape town, and then other, physically diverse routes which go from cape
town to the global internet. (edit: possibly re-routed via physical diversity
from Accra, Ghana or from Nigeria, both of which have a lot more unique cables
connecting them to Portugal, Spain and France. Not necessarily a round trip
all the way to Cape Town).

what is actually going on with a particular cable at layer 1 is considerably
more opaque. telecoms consider some of this information to be proprietary or
guarded information. if you're a carrier with an IRU in a cable or a leased 10
Gbps circuit from city N in africa to a POP in France or the UK you will
likely get periodic NOC updates, and eventually an RFO.

other people who are not direct participants in the cable are not usually high
on the priority list of the repair/maintenance operators.

one of the things that major carrier and ISPs care about is knowing the truly
physical diversity of their routes in and out of every POP. Knowing where
stuff is "collapsed" (eg: two cables running together in the same duct bank to
get to a carrier POP such as one wilshire), and where it is not. this is in
the realm of GIS data that is usually not made public unless you need to know.

~~~
xraystyle
This guy networks.

But yes, generally the actual physical location and routing of fiber optic
cables is not made public by the companies that run it for a number of
reasons. If you're leasing fiber you can request maps of the circuits from the
company providing it, but there's generally no way to obtain this info outside
of this type of business relationship.

Additionally, when purchasing a long-distance circuit, the provider selling
you the circuit may not be the company that actually ran the cable. You might
have to go several layers deeper until you get to whoever actually owns the
fiber. For example, connections like MPLS VLLs present as a direct layer 2
connection but can pass through numerous other network providers' core
networks underneath.

This all means that keeping track of layer 1 is pretty much impossible outside
of the circuits you pay for yourself.

------
monochromatic
> While it may not have been completely problem-free over the last 5+ years,
> online searches do not return any published reports of significant outages
> caused by damage to the cable.

That’s some solid journalism right there. “Well, I googled it and didn’t see
anything.”

------
ListenLinda
About the internet the runs through the sea.
[https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2016/05/how-t...](https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2016/05/how-the-internet-works-submarine-cables-data-centres-last-
mile/)

------
paulie_a
The oceanic version of "back hoe fade"

------
philprx
Of course, this cable cut has nothing to do with this:

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/russian-
submarin...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/russian-submarines-
are-prowling-around-vital-undersea-cables-its-making-nato-
nervous/2017/12/22/d4c1f3da-e5d0-11e7-927a-e72eac1e73b6_story.html)

~~~
walrus01
it is usually fishing trawlers and anchors. not saying that russia and the usa
don't have submarines with the capability to do so, but that everyone knows
deep ocean submarine cables are vulnerable, and nobody wants to open up their
own vulnerable infrastructure to retaliation.

~~~
philprx
hmmm...

[https://siliconangle.com/blog/2013/07/19/how-the-nsa-taps-
un...](https://siliconangle.com/blog/2013/07/19/how-the-nsa-taps-undersea-
fiber-optic-cables/)

~~~
walrus01
I admin some long distance DWDM systems... Cutting a cable and inserting a
MEMS optical switch into a path would introduce a noticeable degradation in
signal level on the Rx end. Not saying it isn't possible, or that they can't
make it look like minor cable damage from being hit by an anchor. The far more
likely scenario is that the NSA has per-circuit taps at major cable landing
stations (New Jersey/New York area, in Cornwall, etc). The GCHQ has a huge
facility very close to where a number of submarine cables land in Cornwall.

Trying to tap and store the data from every wavelength in a 80-channel DWDM
system is like drinking from a firehose of data.

~~~
philprx
Agreed on the difficulty: you would aim first at the low hanging fruit for
placing the taps, the easiest being the onshoring spots.

But... for the MEMS, I consider this as one way only (public, probably
crude/basic) and very possibly we'll learn of other techniques that are usable
in say, 5, 10 or 20 years. That's what our taxes are financing in the end ;-)
research on fundamental new ways to tap the neighbour/hostile country's fiber.

Lastly, I wouldn't sweat it too much on data/speed capacity but more on power
needed to process and Y-split this datafeed to exfil. If in the future we got
to learn that micro/nano-nuclear powerstations were tied to submarine
interception points, I wouldn't be surprised at all.

The data/speed capacity is probably the less difficult part compared to
seamless insertion, power and exfil system.

Now all these are just guesses based on what's public so far thanks to Snowden
& al.

~~~
walrus01
the glimmerglass MEMS product is not really intended for tapping anything.
it's a good example of non classified technology. in real world use by
telecoms and ISPs it's used as a light-path crossconnect builder for 1 to 1
paths between arbitrary fibers in a meet-me room... something like a
labor/time saver for automated testing and lab setups, or to remove the labor
and time involved in running a 15 meter two strand fiber crossconnect across a
room between two fiber patch panels. If I recall correctly there's four or
five companies that make very similar motorized-mirror optical crossconnect
boxes similar to it.

------
mieseratte
It's a real shame Puerto Rico is plagued with corruption resulting in poor
infrastructure.

~~~
drb91
...and ungodly debt. The situation is massively worse than Hurricane Katrina
ever was.

~~~
rdl
Less debt per capita than the US.

The sad thing is most of the debt was post the 1996 US tax change when the US
Government (President Clinton + Republican Congress) decided to phase out the
pharma/manufacturing special deal for Puerto Rico. The government of PR
basically didn't do much to try to replace that industry until 2006 when it
actually left, then started massive borrowing to make up for the shortfall
(operating expenses, not capital spending), then 2008 financial problems
happened and it kept compounding. The hurricane was comparatively minor.

PR people also engaged in protests bordering on terrorism (and some in
outright terrorism) in the US or against US entities in the 20th century, and
this colored the US-PR relationship. Most recently the Puerto Rico Vieques
range protests caused the entire US military to basically pull out of PR,
costing 6000+ jobs.

In 2012 they put in place a bunch of new tax credits for businesses and
individuals, and enhanced them in 2017. It may be too little, too late, but
combined with privatizing the power grid and a bunch of other capital
investment, it's a better outlook today than it was in 2006. The ~$70B in debt
is a big problem but it can be restructured; what matters the most is that the
economy actually works so there is some surplus to service and pay down the
debt.

