Volcano Takes Tonga Offline — and the Repair Timeline Is Measured in Weeks
The Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai eruption on January 15, 2022, knocked the South Pacific nation of Tonga off the Internet, and the outage is expected to last weeks rather than days. The country of roughly 105,000 people across 169 islands lost nearly all connectivity starting at approximately 03:00 UTC that day, according to Cloudflare Radar data. By 05:30 UTC, traffic from the country's primary ISPs, Digicel and Kalianet, had dropped to near zero.
BGP update logs show a sharp spike at 05:35 UTC (18:35 local time), signalling that Tonga's autonomous systems were no longer routable. The pattern mirrors what Cloudflare observed during The Gambia's cable-related outage earlier in January.
Neighbouring American Samoa and Fiji did not experience significant disruption, though American Samoa saw a modest traffic dip on January 14–15 amid severe weather, tsunami warnings and school closures.
One Cable, Two Breaks
Tonga's Internet relies on a single 827 km submarine fiber-optic cable connecting it to Fiji, which in turn links to the broader Southern Cross Cable network. Southern Cross Cable Network confirmed the cable connecting Tonga to the outside world may be broken. The eruption caused a fault in the international cable 37 km from Nukuʻalofa, the capital, plus a second fault in a domestic cable 47 km from the city.
The operator, Tonga Cable Limited (TCL), has begun coordinating with US-based SubCom to dispatch the cable repair ship Reliance from Papua New Guinea, possibly via Samoa—a journey of more than 4,000 km. TCL chairman Samiuela Fonua said repairs could take "at least" four weeks, given the need to thoroughly assess site conditions near ongoing volcanic activity. A 2019 cable cut took nearly two weeks to fix, but the current situation is complicated by the proximity of the faults to the still-active volcano.
Tonga signed a 15-year deal with satellite provider Kacific in 2019 following that earlier cable outage, but Kacific says it is still waiting for the Tongan government to activate the contract.
Not the Only Cable Trouble of January
Tonga's outage is one of several major Internet disruptions in the opening weeks of 2022. Earlier in January, a cable problem took The Gambia offline after a primary link failure on the ACE cable system, which serves 24 countries between Europe and Africa. And on January 7, Space Norway located a disruption in one of the two twin subsea cables serving Svalbard, the world's most northern submarine cable system—with a repair mission still being planned.
These cable breaks are outliers, though. Most Internet outages stem from misconfigurations, power failures, extreme weather or state-imposed shutdowns during unrest, elections or exams—recent examples being Sudan and Kazakhstan.
The Scale of the Subsea Network
The world's Internet depends heavily on undersea fiber-optic cables. According to TeleGeography, there are 428 active submarine cables (with 36 planned), spanning an estimated 1.3 million km. Roughly 99% of intercontinental data traffic crosses oceans via these cables; satellite Internet remains a marginal player, with SpaceX's Starlink serving only about 145,000 users as of early 2022.
World map of submarine cables. Antarctica is the only continent not yet reached by a submarine telecommunications cable. Source: TeleGeography (www.submarinecablemap.com)
Cable capacity is enormous and growing—Google recently finished a subsea link with 350 Tbps of capacity, and the EllaLink cable between Europe and South America supports 100 Tbps. Building these systems is expensive: a planned 8,700 km cable between Portugal and Egypt carries a budget of €326 million.
Submarine cables are generally reliable when redundant paths exist. Tonga's problem is that it has no such redundancy—when its single cable breaks, the country goes dark, and in this case the repair timeline is complicated by the same volcanic activity that caused the damage. Fonua's assessment that repairs will take "at least" four weeks underscores how dependent remote island nations are on a single point of failure beneath the sea.
