Subsea cable fault reroutes Asian traffic for six hours

A fault in one of the Pacific's highest-capacity subsea cables disrupted internet traffic across parts of East and Southeast Asia for roughly six hours on Wednesday before carriers stabilized routing over backup paths.

The break, located east of Taiwan in about 4,000 meters of water, forced traffic onto longer southern routes and pushed latency between Tokyo and Singapore up by as much as 40 milliseconds at the peak. Financial trading venues reported no outages but several cloud providers flagged degraded performance in status updates.

A repair ship is expected on site within nine days. The cause has not been determined; the operator said the fault profile is consistent with an anchor drag.