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For a while, Sam Vea had been smelling sulphur on the air – only mildly infernal, like a distant sniff of hell, but sulphur nonetheless. Still, on the Saturday evening when the explosion happened, he sat up in fright. It sounded so near he thought some cataclysm had occurred right there, in his neighbourhood. The windows trembled. The curtains fell off. Vea peeked out of his house but saw nothing destroyed or on fire, so he looked at his wife and said: “This has to be the volcano.”
Vea and his wife live in Tofoa, which, if you squint and picture Tonga’s main island of Tongatapu as a long, medieval shoe, lies just below the instep, on a gentle rise of earth. They’d just returned home after dropping their daughters at a birthday party, but now Vea dashed to his van to go and collect them. On the way back, the road filled with cars hurrying away from the sea, and tiny pebbles fell from the sky. Not that long before, curious to see what a big volcanic eruption looked like, Vea had watched Dante’s Peak on Netflix. In the movie, he remembered now, a white-hot rock had punched through the roof of a truck and killed Pierce Brosnan’s partner, so he pulled over to wait out the traffic. The skies grew mottled with dust and ash. Drivers got out, took off their shirts and wiped their windshields down so they could see the road ahead. When they reached home, after two and a half hours, Vea sent his children to hide under the bed.
The volcano, with the grand, rolling name of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha‘apai, lies 40 miles north of Tongatapu – mostly under the Pacific Ocean but with two spits of land showing above the water, like the ears of a drowned cat. Since its several brief eruptions the previous month, December 2021, Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha‘apai had continued to gurgle and churn. On that Saturday, 15 January, 2.4 cubic miles of sediment and molten rock shot through its mouth with the force of what scientists call a “magma hammer”, sending a plume of ash at least 35 miles up into the atmosphere. It was the largest atmospheric explosion that modern instruments had recorded, outdoing any nuclear bomb ever detonated. They heard the sound in Alaska. Seven and a half thousand miles away, in the south Indian city of Chennai, meteorologists measured an abrupt spike in atmospheric pressure. It was Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha‘apai, doing its thing.
On his drive home, Vea had called relatives in the US through Facebook Messenger to let them know he was all right. At some point during their conversation, the line cut out. He assumed the network was overloaded by everybody getting online at the same time. “This is usually a problem for us,” he told me. Vea, DHL’s agent in Tonga, is the president of the Tonga Chamber of Commerce & Industry, and we met in his spare, sunny office in the capital of Nuku’alofa, three streets from the Pacific. The curtains were red, and the sun filtered through in a dull watermelon light.
Vea wears a perpetual expression of mirth, and it was difficult to imagine him as worried as he was on the day the volcano blew up, sitting in his van in the middle of a rain of ash, staring at his suddenly useless phone. He decided he’d try his relatives later, after the traffic online subsided. At home, though, the power was out, and he couldn’t charge his phone, so it was only the next morning, when he tuned in to Radio Tonga, that he learned the country had lost its internet altogether – and with it, all its means of reaching the world beyond the wide, silent water.
In the abyssal depths of the ocean, a data cable is a scrawny, unprotected thing, like a snail divested of its shell. Its core consists of fibres of glass, each roughly as thick as a human hair, through which light transmits information at roughly 125,000 miles per second. Around the fibres, there is first a casing of steel for protection, then another of copper to carry electricity to keep the light moving, and then a final sheath of nylon soaked in tar. All this swaddling may sound like plenty of protection, but the layers are all thin, and the final product is – to use the image I heard most often from people in the subsea cable industry – no fatter than a garden hose.
These cables sit on the sea floor, conducting 95% of all the world’s international internet traffic. Humans have laid 870,000 miles of fibre optic cables under the ocean, connecting and reconnecting the eyelets on our shorelines, lacing the Earth tightly together. Cables set out from places such as 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 roughly 550 such submarine cables around the planet, and more are being built every day. A Finnish company once planned to spend a billion or so dollars to lay cable under the Arctic Ocean – a task made easier by how rapidly its ice cover is melting. Upon completion, the cable was designed to shave 20-60 milliseconds off the speed of trades made by banks in Tokyo and London. For now, Antarctica is the only major uncabled landmass on Earth, but it won’t be for long. The US has plans.
The cable that connects Tongatapu to Fiji and thence to the world is 515 miles long and forms part of a cable network called Southern Cross. It was switched on in 2013. A 250-mile domestic cable between Tongatapu and the northern island of Vava‘u began operating in 2018. In general, this pocket of the Pacific is a rough neighbourhood for undersea cables. Along with the volcanoes, there are steep underwater slopes with plenty of canyons, and the regular threat of earthquakes.
Even a year and a half after Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha‘apai’s eruption, no one knew precisely what had happened on the ocean floor that Saturday. But geologist Mike Clare, at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, had pored over enough sonar readings and sediment samples to build a theory. It ran like this: when Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha‘apai shot its innards into the atmosphere, the dense rock and sediment fell back into the ocean at a furious pace, hit the flanks of the volcano and rocketed down its slopes. “It’s like an avalanche, or a log flume in a theme park,” Clare said.
Along the way, the pyroclastic flow gathered more momentum, so that when it met the domestic cable just a few miles away, it was moving as fast as a speeding car. The contest was over before it began. The rock and mud bit a 65-mile section out of the domestic cable and buried it under 65ft of sediment. A different part of the flow, or perhaps the same one, sliced 55 miles of cable out of the middle of the international link to Fiji.
By the time Clare woke up in Southampton on the day of the eruption, his Twitter feed was already awash with discussions and satellite imagery. It took him, and most of the outside world, the better part of a day to realise that Tonga had lost its internet. “Basically, the eruption happens, and 15 minutes later, there’s a drop to about half of what the original internet traffic was, and then about an hour after the eruption, it flatlines.”
That was the moment when Sam Vea’s mobile phone gave out. Landlines died as well, because in Tonga, as in many other countries, even ordinary telephone calls are now routed through data cables. In Southampton, Clare could look at satellite photos and see that the eruption had blessedly left Vava‘u, Tongatapu and other islands in the Tongan archipelago intact, but Tongans themselves couldn’t be sure of that. They had no way of communicating with each other, no way of learning about the condition of other parts of their own, 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 OK.” Another said: “We thought Tongatapu was obliterated. There was just no way to know differently.”
We inhabit the internet in an odd, paradoxical state. It is everywhere, available whenever we desire it, like the air we breathe. This permits us to forget not only its materiality – bottomless quantities of metals and plastics poured and cast into wires, routers, datacentres, servers, towers and repeaters – but also its centrality in our lives. We’re lulled into believing that the internet is only a vehicle for emails, apps, selfies, Zoom meetings and websites that linger too long on unread browser tabs. The fact that the very apparatus of 21st-century life relies on the internet is rendered visible to us only when something snaps, like the sole cable running to Tonga.
The first fallout was communication, of course. In the aftermath of a disaster, even the humble text message assumes grave importance. Are you safe? Is your house still standing? Is the water safe to drink? Tonga runs on Facebook Messenger, particularly on its outer islands, where the phone service is spotty, and without it people had to take to the road – or the sea, or the air – to find anything out. Australia and New Zealand had to send reconnaissance planes over the islands, so that their pilots could eyeball the extent of the damage.
Commerce broke down. Since this happened in the middle of the Covid pandemic, DHL was flying only one plane a week to Tonga – but without the internet, Vea couldn’t file or receive manifests online. The ATMs went dead, because banks couldn’t check how much money their customers had in their accounts – and that, in an economy still accustomed to cash, immediately put livelihoods in danger. Owners of fisheries and farms of squash and breadfruit were unable to fill out the compliance and quarantine forms needed to export their produce. Tongans living overseas couldn’t wire funds home to help their families – and at the time, foreign remittances made up 44% of the country’s GDP.
When I first learned about Tonga’s internet outage, I thought its citizens must have been hurled back to the 1990s. But in fact, the internet has replaced so many other technologies – and Tonga was receiving so few visitors thanks to the pandemic – that the country was catapulted further back still, to a time before the telegraph and scheduled flights reached these parts of the Pacific. With the fracture of a single cable, Tonga was plunged into the kind of isolation it hadn’t seen in more than a century.
Tonga’s cable was cut by a freakish act of nature – but a volcanic eruption is only one of the many perils facing the planet’s network of underwater data cables. Some of these are also marine or geological: landslips, strong currents, very infrequent shark attacks. Others are the product of human accidents, such as a poorly dropped anchor or a fishing boat trawling too close to a cable. These categories of dangers have attended cables since the mid-19th century, when humans first decided to lay a telegraph wire at the bottom of the sea.
The latest risks, minted over the last decade, are corporate misbehaviour and geopolitical strife. Increasingly, subsea cables are commissioned and owned by a very small group of private tech firms, such as Google and Meta – US companies that can easily foot a new cable’s bill that runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars. In parallel, the great powers have realised that data cables in international waters are ripe targets precisely because they’re both so important and so remote. The US and China routinely attempt to thwart each other’s cable projects: permissions denied, contracts stymied, the intrigue as coiled and convoluted as tangles of cable. Europe’s nations have grown more and more convinced that their subsea cables are being deliberately damaged by ships belonging to Russian or Chinese “shadow fleets” – civilian vessels doing their governments’ bidding.
What happened to Tonga could, in theory, happen to anyone – even to the world’s biggest, wealthiest nations. The two US coasts, for instance, may be far more thickly connected with cables than Tongatapu, but all those cables do eventually run into the inky depths of the deep ocean, where they’re protected by neither military nor legal muscle. The world today has come to depend utterly on these cables – and in tandem, these cables have grown more and more exposed to the whims of rogue corporate and national actors. The future of the internet, in part, will entail the weaponisation of its submarine cable systems. Information, after all, is wealth and power – not only in how you use it, but how you can throttle it.
The safety of the cables in the ocean is a national security issue, a precondition for the economy, and a matter of literal life and death.
On my second day in Tonga, I walked west out of Nuku’alofa – past the dock where cruise ships nuzzled the shore, around the corner of the parliament complex, past the royal palace and along the coast road. The afternoon was warm, and the sun glinted off the Pacific, so when a police paddy wagon slowed down and offered me a ride, I took it. They let me off outside a small, glass-fronted building facing the sea: the headquarters of Tonga Cable Limited, as well as the landing station of the international cable that came to the country from Fiji. In the Tonga station, the international cable led into a ferociously cold room, where tall stacks of servers and switches sit in cabinets of airbrushed metal.
Around the planet, cable stations sit on all kinds of coastline: glorious beaches, or the seaward edge of teeming metropolises, or the crevices of fjords, or near forests or deserts. But the stations themselves are near-identical: universal pieces of refrigerated internet infrastructure plonked down in distinctly local surroundings. They’re built to be outwardly unremarkable but also unbreachable. Often, these buildings offer no signage or other clues to their purpose. Their specs are hardcore. “Can it take a light plane crash? It’s got a really heavy-duty double-skinned roof,” a cable entrepreneur told Nicole Starosielski in her book The Undersea Network. “Can it take an 80km-an-hour 20-ton truck? Yes, it can because of the way it’s been constructed. What if someone decided to take you out? Can they?”
The stations are prepared for fire, flood, power outages, high heat, frost and humid days. What will definitely put them out of action, though, is a cable cut far out at sea.
The chief executive of Tonga Cable was, at the time of my visit, a dapper, genial 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 for the Tonga Cable station on foot. When he was still half a mile away, he saw that the road ahead was blocked with rocks and debris. In some spots, whole boats had been lifted inland.
Close to midnight, soldiers arrived to clear the way. Then Panuve, his deputy, Sosofate Kolo, and a brace of engineers settled in for a night of work. They checked the servers and power, but nothing was amiss. The alarms on the monitoring system were lit up like a Christmas tree, indicating a cable fault. The diagnosis didn’t take very long; indeed, to Kolo, it had been obvious the minute his internet had cut out earlier that evening, in the middle of a Facebook browse. Early the next morning, the team ran an Optical Time Domain Reflection test – sending a series of light signals down the cable and measuring the strength of the backscattered pulses. That helped gauge where the outage was: roughly 26 miles off the coast of Tongatapu.
This was sufficient information to file an emergency repair request. Like other operators, Tonga Cable was part of a regional cable maintenance consortium, paying a quarterly “subscription” to SubCom, the company contracted to maintain cables in the south Pacific, to keep a ship in the area so that it could attend to cable faults. 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, “because we hadn’t used it since 2019, when the cable last broke because of a ship anchor.” Then they could do nothing but wait for help to arrive.
Tonga’s government, too, was trying to find a way to get back online, and the job fell to MEIDECC, a kind of catch-all ministry responsible for meteorology, energy, information, disaster management, environment, climate change and communications. “We weren’t prepared, even though we’d had our cable cut in 2019,” Stan Ahio, a ministry official, told me with an embarrassed laugh.
A day after the eruption, Ahio remembered that the ministry owned an old satellite phone. “We’d stopped paying the subscription two years ago, but I thought: ‘Everyone outside must know what’s happening here. Maybe they’ll realise it’s an emergency and switch it back on for us,’” he said. His wild surmise about the benevolence of some distant corporate executive proved correct.
“The first person I called was my sister in New Zealand,” Ahio said – and here, his chuckles turned into soft sobs at the memory. Nothing here was about cold technology; it was about the proof of being alive. “That was such a difficult time.” He permitted himself to cry for a few seconds before regaining his composure. “Then we called the International Telecommunication Union, which is a United Nations agency, to see if we could get some satellite connectivity.” It took three or four days to resurrect the satellite dishes on the island, and to get the first meagre taste of bandwidth: 120 megabytes per second, rationed for the use of ministries and other essential work.
On the outlying islands, there were no satellite phones or dishes waiting to be retrieved from cold storage. Vava‘u was a whole island of people trying to tell the world they were all right. If it hadn’t been for Roy Neymen, a sailor who’d berthed his yacht there temporarily, they might have gone many days without getting the word out. On his yacht, Neymen had a Garmin device that sent expensive text messages through satellite, and he used this to contact government agencies in Australia and New Zealand. For a while, he set up a communications centre in a local cafe, where Vava‘u’s residents could come to dictate their messages to Neymen, as if he were the designated letter-writer in a medieval village, and thus reach their relatives overseas. In two weeks, he sent out 1,600 messages. (At Neymen’s request, Garmin covered the costs.)
But this served only a very narrow need. The islanders still had no communication between themselves, and no way to log on to the internet – to send longer emails, or to retrieve money sent to them from overseas, or to conduct their business. The ATMs remained inert, and bank branches couldn’t disburse money without first establishing how much their customers had in their accounts.
After a couple of weeks, when the government began daily flights between Tongatapu and Vava‘u, a strange and roundabout solution was improvised. Every morning, a bank headquarters on Tongatapu would download on to a thumb drive a spreadsheet with the account details of Vava‘u’s residents; the thumb drive would then be flown to Vava‘u, where the bank branch could work off the spreadsheet to update withdrawals and deposits; the same evening, the thumb drive would return to Tongatapu, so that revisions could be made to the bank’s main database.
A month after the volcanic eruption, SpaceX donated 50 Starlink terminals to Tonga – the country’s first fat slice of connectivity. The Starlinks were distributed across institutions such as ministries and banks but also to community halls, restaurants and other businesses and public spaces; many went to the outer islands, including Vava‘u. “All the wifi was free, so anyone could come into range and use it,” Ahio said. “It was always congested!”
A foreign diplomat told me that she’d see Tongans in these wifi oases late into the night, trying to catch up on work: “One woman told me she was doing an online course at the University of the South Pacific, and that she had to sit in her car typing out her coursework.”
After Semisi Panuve made his emergency call to SubCom to request a cable fix, his first headache was just how much cable was missing. The eruption had cut a 55-mile section out of the middle of the international cable that ran to Tonga from Fiji – an unusually large repair job. Companies routinely keep extra cable in depots located in ports around the world – in Cádiz and Bermuda, in Wujing and Apia. In the Apia depot in Samoa, run by SubCom, there were only 18 miles or so of spare cable of the sort could be patched into Tonga’s international cable. That was a reasonable length of spare cable to hold for most contingencies – but not for the most powerful underwater volcanic eruption ever recorded.
SubCom always had a cable ship – a 140-metre-long vessel named Reliance – in the neighbourhood. When Tonga’s cable broke, the Reliance was docked in Papua New Guinea, which was a stroke of fortune; it could have been out at sea, just beginning another elaborate repair. The ship had to wait around for a while for an engineer to fly in from the US. Sailing to Samoa to pick up the spare cable and other equipment took the better part of a week.
When it embarked on the repair, in waters more than a mile deep, the Reliance found that the rupture in Tonga’s international cable was no ordinary matter. Routinely, when a ship drags its grapnel along the sea floor to snag the snapped end of a cable, it requires just one or two attempts to nab its quarry. To locate the eastern break in the cable, off the coast of Tongatapu, the Reliance required seven drags, even with the help of a submarine remotely operated vehicle (ROV). Having tethered that end to a buoy, the Reliance steamed towards Fiji to search for the second break and fasten that to a surface buoy as well – a gnarly task, because the visibility underwater was so clouded by silt and sediment that the ROV offered few clean images to its operators.
The Reliance returned to the cable that ran out from Tongatapu, untied it from its buoy, and spliced it to one end of the spare cable on board. Then, unspooling the spare cable as it slowly headed west, laying it down carefully so that it had plenty of slack, the crew spliced its other end to the cable from Fiji. The splicing is intricate work: first the peeling back of the cable’s various protective layers; then the cleaning of the glass fibres in a sonic bath, with what is essentially high-frequency sound, because even the most delicate physical contact with them might shatter them; then the soft placement of the two ends in a fusion splicer the size of a shoebox. An arc of electricity melts the glass fibres and fuses them. Then the glass has to be re-sheathed all over again. The entire process can take the better part of a night, sometimes longer – and it’s all done in a room that rises and sinks and sways with the ocean’s swells.
All told, the repair of the international cable took five weeks. Tonga’s capital – and its ministries, traders, DHL agents, schoolteachers, Facebook merchants and diplomats – had come back online. Vava‘u, though, seemed consigned to an indeterminate future of WhatsApp calls made in public cafes, homework completed in car parks, and life in general without the internet at hand.
Only in August 2023, more than 18 months after it was first cut off, did broadband internet return to Vava‘u. When I was there, a couple of months later, people still seemed to be revelling in the novelty of fast and ubiquitous internet. Once again, you could check your email anywhere. Most of the Starlinks came down.
The following summer, though, another earthquake wiped out the same domestic cable. Tonga’s government had just ordered Starlink to suspend operations in the country until it obtained a full licence, so once again, Vava‘u found itself consigned to the dark. When I read about this, I remembered my conversation with Sam Vea, sitting in his office at the Tonga Chamber of Commerce & Industry, the sea breeze filling out his thin crimson curtains. The only way for a cable break not to cripple the country, he told me, was for Tonga to have a second cable – and routed differently, so that an undersea geological convulsion couldn’t blow them both out at the same time.
Vea handed me a document: an update to the Tongan government’s infrastructure investment plan for the decade, issued after the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha‘apai eruption. A new domestic cable linking Tongatapu to Vava‘u had shot to the top of the government’s priority list – above the upgrading of hospitals and water supply systems, above the construction of a new bridge, above the refurbishment of the parliament and courts.
The government budgeted its cost at about $16.5m. Vea shrugged. Where would Tonga find the money? It was already relying on donors and friendly governments to build its schools and fix its roads, and as a nation of small islands, it also hoped to secure funding under the Paris Agreement to beat back climate change. A new data cable could arrive only as largesse from others. One hundred and sixty-five years after the first telegraph link was laid, these cables still wind around the world just as the great powers and their corporations see fit – to the point that the cables become tokens themselves of the contests for might and wealth, shaping and distorting the internet as we know it.
Adapted from The Web Beneath the Waves: The Fragile Cables That Connect our World, published by Columbia Global Reports on 14 October
