For some time, Sam Vea had noticed the faint scent of sulfur in the air—not overpowering, just a hint of something infernal, like a whiff of hell from afar. Yet when the explosion shook his home on that Saturday evening, he jolted upright in alarm. The blast felt so close he was sure something catastrophic had struck his own neighborhood. The windows rattled, and the curtains tumbled down. Vea peered outside but saw no destruction or flames, so he turned to his wife and said, “It must be the volcano.”
Vea and his wife live in Tofoa, a spot nestled just below the instep if you imagine Tonga’s main island, Tongatapu, as a long, old-fashioned shoe. They had just returned from dropping their daughters at a birthday party when Vea rushed to his van to fetch them. On the drive back, the road was packed with cars fleeing the coast, and small stones began to rain from the sky. Not long before, curious about volcanic eruptions, Vea had watched Dante’s Peak on Netflix. He recalled a scene where a blazing rock smashed through a truck roof, killing Pierce Brosnan’s companion, so he pulled over to wait out the traffic. The sky grew patchy with dust and ash. Drivers stepped out, using their shirts to wipe their windshields clear. When they finally reached home two and a half hours later, Vea sent his children to take cover under the bed.
The volcano, Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha‘apai, lies 40 miles north of Tongatapu—mostly submerged beneath the Pacific, with two slivers of land poking above the water like the ears of a drowned cat. After a series of brief eruptions in December 2021, it had continued to rumble and bubble. On Saturday, January 15, it unleashed 2.4 cubic miles of sediment and molten rock with what scientists call a “magma hammer,” propelling an ash plume at least 35 miles into the sky. It was the largest atmospheric explosion ever recorded by modern instruments, surpassing even the most powerful nuclear bombs. The sound reached Alaska, and 7,500 miles away in Chennai, India, meteorologists detected a sudden spike in atmospheric pressure. Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha‘apai was making its presence known.
During his drive, Vea had called relatives in the U.S. via Facebook Messenger to reassure them he was safe. Mid-conversation, the call dropped. He assumed the network was overloaded with everyone trying to get online at once. “That’s a common issue for us,” he told me. Vea, who serves as DHL’s agent in Tonga and is president of the Tonga Chamber of Commerce & Industry, met with me in his simple, sunlit office in the capital, Nuku’alofa, just three streets from the Pacific. Red curtains hung in the windows, and the sun cast a soft, watermelon-colored glow.
Vea usually wears a cheerful expression, making it hard to picture him as anxious as he was that day, sitting in his van amid falling ash, staring at his useless phone. He decided to try his relatives again once online traffic eased. But back home, the power was out, and he couldn’t charge his phone. It wasn’t until the next morning, tuning in to Radio Tonga, that he learned the country had lost its internet connection entirely—cutting off all communication with the world beyond the vast, silent ocean.
Deep under the sea, a data cable is a slender, vulnerable thing, like a snail stripped of its shell. At its heart are glass fibers, each as thin as a human hair, carrying information at nearly 125,000 miles per second. These fibers are wrapped in a steel casing for protection, then a copper layer to power the light signals, and finally a nylon sheath soaked in tar. While all these layers might seem like ample protection,The layers are all thin, and the final product is no thicker than a garden hose—an image I frequently heard from those in the subsea cable industry. These cables rest on the ocean floor, carrying 95% of the world’s international internet traffic. Humans have laid 870,000 miles of fiber optic cables beneath the sea, linking the shorelines like eyelets and tightly weaving the Earth together. Cables begin in places like Crescent Beach in Rhode Island, Wall Township in New Jersey, and Island Park in New York, and end in locations from Penmarch in France to Bilbao in Spain and Bude in the United Kingdom.
There are about 550 such submarine cables worldwide, with more being added daily. A Finnish company once planned to invest around a billion dollars to lay a cable under the Arctic Ocean, a task made simpler by the rapid melting of its ice. Once completed, this cable was expected to reduce trading times by 20–60 milliseconds for banks in Tokyo and London. For now, Antarctica remains the only major landmass without cables, but that won’t last long—the US has plans to change that.
The cable connecting Tongatapu to Fiji and beyond is 515 miles long and part of the Southern Cross network, activated in 2013. A 250-mile domestic cable between Tongatapu and the northern island of Vava‘u started operating in 2018. This part of the Pacific is particularly challenging for undersea cables, with volcanoes, steep underwater slopes, deep canyons, and frequent earthquakes.
Even a year and a half after the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha‘apai eruption, the exact events on the ocean floor that Saturday remained unclear. However, geologist Mike Clare from the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton had studied sonar data and sediment samples to form a theory. He suggested that when the volcano erupted, dense rock and sediment shot into the atmosphere and then fell back into the ocean at high speed, hitting the volcano’s sides and racing down its slopes. “It’s like an avalanche or a log flume at a theme park,” Clare explained.
As the pyroclastic flow gained momentum, it reached speeds comparable to a speeding car by the time it encountered the domestic cable just a few miles away. The outcome was swift and devastating: the flow tore out a 65-mile section of the domestic cable and buried it under 65 feet of sediment. Another part of the flow, or possibly the same one, severed 55 miles of the international cable to Fiji.
By the time Clare woke up in Southampton on the day of the eruption, his Twitter feed was already filled with discussions and satellite images. It took him and much of the outside world nearly a day to realize that Tonga had lost its internet. “Basically, the eruption happens, and 15 minutes later, internet traffic drops to about half of what it was, and then an hour later, it flatlines,” he noted.
That was when Sam Vea’s mobile phone stopped working. Landlines also failed because, like in many countries, Tonga’s phone calls are routed through data cables. From Southampton, Clare could see satellite images showing that the eruption had spared Vava‘u, Tongatapu, and other islands in the Tongan archipelago. But Tongans themselves had no way of knowing this. They couldn’t communicate with each other or learn about conditions in other parts of their small country. “For a week, I didn’t know what happened to my family on Tongatapu,” one man in Vava‘u told me. “I have a brother in Nuku’alofa. I had to assume he was okay.” Another said, “We thought Tongatapu was obliterated. There was just no way to know otherwise.”
We live with the internet in a strange, contradictory state. It is eThe internet is everywhere, available whenever we want it, like the air we breathe. This makes it easy to overlook not just its physical form—vast amounts of metals and plastics shaped into wires, routers, data centers, servers, towers, and repeaters—but also how central it is to our lives. We’re led to believe that the internet is just a tool for emails, apps, selfies, Zoom calls, and forgotten browser tabs. Its true importance only becomes clear when something breaks, like the single cable connecting Tonga.
Communication was the first casualty, of course. In a disaster, even a simple text message takes on serious weight: Are you safe? Is your home still standing? Is the water drinkable? Tonga relies heavily on Facebook Messenger, especially on its outer islands where phone service is unreliable. Without it, people had to travel by land, sea, or air to get information. Australia and New Zealand sent reconnaissance planes so pilots could assess the damage firsthand.
Commerce ground to a halt. In the middle of the Covid pandemic, DHL was only flying one plane a week to Tonga, but without the internet, Vea couldn’t send or receive manifests online. ATMs stopped working because banks couldn’t verify account balances—a major problem in an economy still dependent on cash, putting people’s livelihoods at immediate risk. Fishermen and farmers couldn’t complete the compliance and quarantine forms needed to export their goods like squash and breadfruit. Tongans abroad couldn’t send money home to support their families, and at that time, remittances made up 44% of the country’s GDP.
When I first heard about Tonga’s internet outage, I imagined its people had been thrown back to the 1990s. But the internet has replaced so many older technologies, and with few visitors due to the pandemic, Tonga was pushed even further back—to a time before telegraphs and regular flights reached this part of the Pacific. The break of one cable isolated the country in a way it hadn’t experienced for over a century.
Tonga’s cable was severed by a rare natural event, but volcanic eruptions are just one of many threats to the world’s underwater data cables. Others include marine or geological hazards like landslides, strong currents, and the occasional shark bite. Human error also plays a role, such as anchors dropped carelessly or fishing boats operating too close to cables. These risks have existed since the mid-19th century when the first telegraph cables were laid on the ocean floor.
More recent dangers, emerging over the past decade, involve corporate misconduct and geopolitical tensions. A handful of private tech companies, like Google and Meta, now commission and own most undersea cables—American firms that can afford the hundreds of millions of dollars it costs to lay a new one. At the same time, world powers have realized that data cables in international waters are prime targets because they’re both vital and remote. The U.S. and China regularly sabotage each other’s cable projects by denying permits, blocking contracts, and engaging in intricate schemes. European nations increasingly suspect that their undersea cables are being intentionally damaged by Russian or Chinese “shadow fleets”—civilian ships acting on government orders.
What happened to Tonga could, in theory, happen to anyone—even the world’s largest and wealthiest nations.For example, while the US coasts are much more densely connected with cables than Tongatapu, all these cables eventually run into the dark depths of the ocean, where they are protected by neither military might nor legal power. Today, the world relies completely on these cables, and at the same time, they have become increasingly vulnerable to the whims of rogue corporate and state actors. Part of the internet’s future will involve the weaponization of its undersea cable systems. After all, information is wealth and power—not just in how you use it, but in how you can restrict it.
The security of these ocean cables is a national security concern, a prerequisite for the economy, and a matter of life and death.
On my second day in Tonga, I walked west from Nuku’alofa—past the dock where cruise ships nestled against the shore, around the parliament complex, by the royal palace, and along the coastal road. The afternoon was warm, with the sun sparkling on the Pacific, so when a police van slowed down and offered me a ride, I accepted. They dropped me off outside a small, glass-fronted building facing the sea: the headquarters of Tonga Cable Limited, which also served as the landing station for the international cable connecting the country to Fiji. Inside the station, the cable led into an intensely cold room where tall stacks of servers and switches sat in sleek metal cabinets.
Around the world, cable stations are located on all sorts of coastlines: beautiful beaches, the edges of bustling cities, fjord crevices, or near forests and deserts. But the stations themselves are nearly identical: standardized, refrigerated internet infrastructure dropped into distinctly local settings. They are designed to be unremarkable from the outside yet impenetrable. Often, these buildings have no signs or hints about their purpose. Their specifications are robust. “Can it withstand a light plane crash? It has a heavy-duty double-skinned roof,” a cable entrepreneur told Nicole Starosielski in her book The Undersea Network. “Can it handle an 80 km/h, 20-ton truck? Yes, because of how it’s built. What if someone tries to take you out? Can they?”
The stations are prepared for fire, flood, power outages, extreme heat, frost, and humidity. However, what will definitely disable them is a cable cut far out at sea.
At the time of my visit, the CEO of Tonga Cable was a well-dressed, friendly man named Semisi Panuve. Late on the evening of the eruption, when he thought the ash in the air had drifted out to sea, Panuve set out on foot for the Tonga Cable station. When he was still half a mile away, he saw the road ahead blocked by rocks and debris. In some places, entire boats had been carried inland.
Close to midnight, soldiers arrived to clear the path. Then Panuve, his deputy Sosofate Kolo, and a team of engineers settled in for a night of work. They checked the servers and power, but everything seemed fine. The monitoring system alarms were lit up like a Christmas tree, indicating a cable fault. The diagnosis didn’t take long; in fact, to Kolo, it had been obvious the moment his internet cut out earlier that evening while he was browsing Facebook. Early the next morning, the team conducted an Optical Time Domain Reflectometer test—sending light signals down the cable and measuring the strength of the reflected pulses. This helped pinpoint the outage location: about 26 miles off the coast of Tongatapu.
This information was enough to file an emergency repair request. Like other operators, Tonga Cable was part of a regional cable maintenance consortium, paying a quarterly fee to SubCom, the company contracted to maintain cables in the South Pacific, to keep a ship in the area for cable repairs. To contact SubCom, Panuve found a satellite phone that Tonga Cable owned. “We had to scramble around to see if it was still working,” he said.He explained, “We hadn’t used it since 2019, when a ship’s anchor last severed the cable.” All they could do then was wait for assistance.
The Tongan government was also scrambling to restore communications, a task assigned to MEIDECC—a ministry handling meteorology, energy, information, disaster management, environment, climate change, and communications. Stan Ahio, an official from the ministry, admitted with an embarrassed laugh, “We weren’t prepared, even though our cable was cut in 2019.”
A day after the eruption, Ahio recalled that the ministry had an old satellite phone. “We’d stopped paying the subscription two years earlier, but I thought, ‘People outside must know what’s happening here. Maybe they’ll recognize it’s an emergency and reactivate it for us.'” His hopeful guess about a distant company’s goodwill turned out to be right.
“The first person I called was my sister in New Zealand,” Ahio said, his laughter turning into quiet sobs at the memory. It wasn’t about the technology; it was about confirming they were alive. “That was such a difficult time.” He allowed himself a moment to cry before composing himself. “Then we contacted the International Telecommunication Union, a UN agency, to see if we could get satellite connectivity.” It took three or four days to set up the satellite dishes and get a small taste of bandwidth: 120 megabytes per second, reserved for ministries and essential work.
On the outer islands, there were no satellite phones or dishes in storage. Vava’u was an entire island of people desperate to let the world know they were safe. If not for Roy Neymen, a sailor who had temporarily docked his yacht there, they might have remained cut off for days. Neymen used a Garmin device on his yacht to send costly satellite texts to government agencies in Australia and New Zealand. He set up a communication center in a local cafe, where residents could dictate messages to him, much like a village scribe in older times, to reach their relatives abroad. Over two weeks, he sent 1,600 messages. (Garmin covered the costs at his request.)
But this only addressed a limited need. Islanders still couldn’t communicate with each other or access the internet—to send longer emails, receive money from overseas, or conduct business. ATMs were down, and banks couldn’t distribute funds without knowing customers’ account balances.
After a couple of weeks, when the government started daily flights between Tongatapu and Vava’u, an improvised solution emerged. Each morning, the main bank in Tongatapu would download account details for Vava’u residents onto a thumb drive, which was flown to Vava’u. The local branch would update withdrawals and deposits from the drive, and by evening, it returned to Tongatapu to sync with the main database.
A month after the eruption, SpaceX donated 50 Starlink terminals to Tonga, providing the country with its first substantial connectivity. These were distributed to ministries, banks, community halls, restaurants, and public spaces, including Vava’u. “All the wifi was free, so anyone within range could use it,” Ahio said. “It was always congested!”
A foreign diplomat mentioned seeing Tongans gathered around these wifi hotspots late into the night,A woman shared with me that she was taking an online course through the University of the South Pacific and had to sit in her car to type out her assignments.
After Semisi Panuve urgently contacted SubCom to fix the cable, his initial challenge was determining how much cable was missing. The volcanic eruption had severed a 55-mile section from the middle of the international cable connecting Tonga to Fiji—an unusually extensive repair. Companies typically store extra cable in depots at ports worldwide, such as in Cádiz, Bermuda, Wujing, and Apia. At SubCom’s depot in Apia, Samoa, there were only about 18 miles of spare cable compatible with Tonga’s international line. While that’s usually enough for most emergencies, it wasn’t sufficient for the most powerful underwater volcanic eruption ever recorded.
Fortunately, SubCom had a cable ship named Reliance, a 140-meter-long vessel, nearby. When Tonga’s cable broke, the Reliance was docked in Papua New Guinea—a lucky break, as it could have been at sea starting another complex repair. The ship had to wait for an engineer to arrive from the US, and then it took nearly a week to sail to Samoa to collect the spare cable and equipment.
Once the repair began in waters over a mile deep, the Reliance discovered the damage was far from ordinary. Normally, dragging a grapnel along the seafloor to catch a broken cable end takes just one or two tries. But to find the eastern break near Tongatapu, the ship needed seven attempts, even with the help of a remotely operated submarine vehicle (ROV). After securing that end to a buoy, the Reliance headed toward Fiji to locate the second break and attach it to another buoy—a tricky job because silt and sediment clouded the water, making it hard for the ROV to provide clear images.
The Reliance then returned to the Tongatapu cable, untied it from the buoy, and connected it to one end of the spare cable onboard. As the ship moved west, carefully laying the spare cable with extra slack, the crew spliced the other end to the Fiji cable. Splicing is delicate work: first, peeling back the cable’s protective layers; then cleaning the glass fibers in a sonic bath using high-frequency sound, since even gentle touch could break them; and finally, aligning the ends in a shoebox-sized fusion splicer where an electric arc melts and fuses the glass. Afterward, the glass must be re-covered. This entire process can take most of a night or longer, all while working in a room that sways with the ocean’s motion.
In total, the international cable repair took five weeks. Tonga’s capital—along with its government offices, businesses, schools, and residents—regained internet access. However, Vava’u seemed stuck in a limbo of relying on WhatsApp calls in cafes, doing homework in parking lots, and living without reliable internet.
It wasn’t until August 2023, over 18 months after the initial outage, that broadband returned to Vava’u. When I visited a few months later, people were still enjoying the novelty of fast, widespread internet. Emails could be checked anywhere again, and most Starlink units were taken down.
But the following summer, another earthquake damaged the same domestic cable. Since Tonga’s government had just ordered Starlink to halt operations until it got a full license, Vava’u was once again left in the dark. Reading about this reminded me of my conversation with the woman in her car.I met with Sam Vea in his office at the Tonga Chamber of Commerce & Industry, where the sea breeze billowed through his thin crimson curtains. He explained that the only way to prevent a cable break from paralyzing the nation was for Tonga to install a second cable—one that followed a different route, so a single undersea geological event couldn’t disrupt both at once.
Vea handed me a document: an updated version of the Tongan government’s ten-year infrastructure investment plan, released after the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha‘apai eruption. A new domestic cable connecting Tongatapu to Vava‘u had jumped to the top of the government’s priorities—surpassing hospital upgrades, water supply improvements, the construction of a new bridge, and even renovations to parliament and court buildings.
The government estimated the cost at around $16.5 million. Vea shrugged, wondering where Tonga would find the funds. The country already relies on donors and friendly governments to build schools and repair roads. As a small island nation, it also hopes to secure Paris Agreement funding to combat climate change. A new data cable would likely only come as a gift from others.
It’s been 165 years since the first telegraph cable was laid, yet these undersea lines still trace paths around the globe according to the interests of major powers and their corporations. So much so that the cables themselves have become symbols in the struggle for influence and wealth, shaping—and warping—the internet as we know it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Of course Here is a list of helpful and clear FAQs about Samanth Subramanians article Off the Grid A Pacific Islands Internet Blackout
General Beginner Questions
1 What is this article about
Its a longform journalism piece that tells the story of what happened to the people of Papua New Guineas Bougainville island when their sole undersea internet cable broke cutting them off from the online world for weeks
2 Who is the author
The author is Samanth Subramanian an awardwinning journalist known for his indepth reporting and narrative nonfiction
3 What caused the internet blackout
The blackout was caused by a fault in the single undersea fiberoptic cable that connected the island to the global internet The exact cause is often difficult to pinpoint
4 How long did the blackout last
The article details a blackout that lasted for several weeks highlighting the immense challenge of repairing a cable at the bottom of the ocean
Impact Consequences
5 What was the immediate effect on peoples daily lives
People couldnt use mobile data make digital payments use social media or contact family abroad Essential services that relied on the internet were severely disrupted
6 How did the blackout affect the local economy
Businesses that depended on online transactions ground to a halt It disrupted communication for trade and highlighted the economic vulnerability of being connected by a single cable
7 Were there any unexpected positive effects of the blackout
The article explores how some people reconnected with their immediate community and local environment experiencing a break from the constant noise of the online world
8 What does this story reveal about global inequality
It shows how fragile internet access can be in remote and less wealthy regions compared to wellconnected urban areas that have multiple backup systems It highlights the digital divide
Deeper Advanced Questions
9 What is the main argument or thesis of the article
The article argues that our dependence on the internet is both a lifeline and a vulnerability It uses Bougainvilles story to show how a digital blackout forces a society to confront what it has gained and lost in the digital age
