Here we go again: broken undersea cable brings internet misery to Vietnam

If you’re reading this in Vietnam, it likely took several minutes – enlivened by swearing and gesticulating – to open this page. That’s because a Vietnamese segment of the crucial
Trans-Pacific internet cable has reportedly ruptured.

The breakage has occurred on several sections of the S1H segment of the undersea cable that branches off towards Hong Kong, reports Thanh Nien News citing a statement from cable operator Asia-America Gateway (AAG). This appears to have left other countries in the region, such as Thailand and Malaysia, unaffected as they’re not on the same branch of the cable.

AAG is locating the breaks and has not yet indicated when this outage – the latest of several in the past couple of years – will be fixed. The 20,000-kilometer-long series of tubes connects Southeast Asia with the US west coast, going through Guam and Hawaii.

This GIF from Asia-America Gateway shows the cable’s route.

The most recent cable breakage occurred a few months ago, affecting Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Brunei, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Guam, and the Philippines. That took about 20 days to fix once the issue had been found, amounting to nearly a month of internet woes for people in the affected countries.

Fnng. Groan. Damn internet. Back to dialup speed again. http://t.co/LWvb2JVSRj

— josh kopeček (@joshkopecek) January 5, 2015

Not even 4 months since last #Internet issue in #Vietnam – #Slowing down again… http://t.co/ad91ZyGZrn

— Tanguy Sutunam (@tanguysutunam) January 5, 2015