Tonga’s volcanic eruption cut it off from the world. Here’s what it needs to do to reconnect it.

“Who’s cable is repaired first is a priority,” Madori said. “The state pays a little premium to get it fixed in the first place.” Once one of these ships arrives on site (which itself can take days), it drops a hook to hook on a cable that runs along the seafloor. The hooked cable can be as thin as an ordinary garden hose in the deep sea and then spooled onto the deck of a boat, where technicians repair the break. “The cable itself is not the strongest thing,” Kaufman said. Then gently put it back into the water. “In 150 years or so, the process hasn’t changed so much that we have submarine cables,” Madori said.

Of course, there are a few complicating factors that can complicate the process. Tonga is likely to be besieged by boats seeking to provide aid to the country, which could mean internet cables have a secondary role in saving lives, restoring power and providing vital food and water supplies. The precise location of the break also complicates things: In general, the farther the break is from shore and the deeper the cable, the harder it will be to pull it up from the floor. That’s before considering the onshore power lines that help keep the connection online are likely to be damaged beyond repair. “Tonga is on the edge of the internet,” Madori said. “Once you get out of the core of the internet, your options diminish.”

Internet outages show how reliant the world’s Internet connections are on a single point of failure. “The idea that the internet is designed to defend against nuclear war is one of those lies,” said Alan Woodward, a professor of cybersecurity at the University of Surrey in the UK. “Gum can hold most things together.” Woodward suggests that things like volcanic eruptions are rare The physical events of 2009 are difficult to design for, but countries should try to maintain redundancy through multiple subsea connections, preferably those that follow different routes, so that localized events do not affect multiple routes.

However, layoffs don’t come cheap – especially for a small country like Tonga with a population of just over 100,000. It is also possible that a massive eruption like this one would occur, where the movement of the seabed would cause cracks in any secondary cable, even if it was laid on the other side of Tonga.

“There’s a broader message about the resilience of infrastructure,” said Andrew Bennett, who analyzes internet policy at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. “Geopolitical tensions and debates are growing, even though the UK or the US won’t be like Tonga[around] Talk about things like undersea cables that push us to a trickier place. You don’t want to end up in a place where you have sovereign cables to allies and other cables to everyone else. ”

Bennett proposes two options for bridging the connectivity gap. One is the rapid rollout of satellite internet — as we speak, satellite constellations are being launched into space. Another is to put more money into the problem. “If you see resilient internet infrastructure as a public good, then countries that can afford it should pay for it and make it available to others,” he said.Bridging the global digital divide by 2030 will Only 0.2% of GNI More than OECD countries every year, according to the institute.

Given that the internet is increasingly seen as the fourth most important service after heat, electricity and water, such a prolonged outage would be a major disaster for 100,000 people – exacerbating the immediate physical impact of the eruption. It highlights the fragility of some parts of the internet, especially outside the wealthy Western world. “The core of the internet doesn’t necessarily collapse,” Woodward said. “But it’s always going to be a little frayed around the edges.”