Stop the World Wide Web with a Bucket and Spade

Here’s a story about how vulnerable the internet really is. It started this morning with an email problem.

eMail problem?

This morning my email would not download. I was getting a ‘server refused connection’ error. So, I used webmail and got in another way. Literally.

Puzzling.

And then I discovered that there had been a 4 hour outage on Asia-Africa-Europe-1 (AAE-1), a 25,000km submarine cable operated by a telecom consortium. It connects South East Asia to Europe by way of Egypt.

Except it’s not entirely submarine.

Some of it runs over land. In Egypt.

In an interview with TheRegister, Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at network monitoring company Kentik, said:

“Whatever break took place was terrestrial in Egypt,” he added, which he said was good news. “If the break were in the water, it would be a matter of days before it could be repaired.”

He added that another cable, SEA-ME-WE 5, also appears to have been affected briefly.

That’s a strange, because these cables are not supposed to have any inter-dependency.

Vulnerability

Even though these cables travel under the ocean for much of their length, they are vulnerable there to interference by submarines.

And sometimes they are barely protected, even when they carry high security data between governments such as the US and UK.

You can stand six feet away from one on a beach in Cornwall, UK. I stumbled across this crazy story about the Apollo 3 cable when researching my book 'Cause of All Causes’:

I'm standing on the internet. Six feet beneath me, buried in the soft sand of a north Cornwall beach popular with surfers, is one of the most important telecommunications cables in the country — the £250m Apollo North OALC-4 SPDA cable that provides the most powerful physical internet connection between the UK and the US - The Guardian

Apollo has another cable which comes ashore in Lannion, Brittany. I anchored my boat there once. The locations where these cable come ashore are marked with signs so that yachtsmen and fisherman don’t anchor over them or trawl them up.

Secret and robust?

It just goes to show how vulnerable these cables are, even those carrying data between the US CIA and the UK’s MI6 (Apollo does — I checked, but if I told you how I’d have to kill you.).

Experts describe the network as robust, resilient and self healing.

So that’s why I couldn’t log on to my email this morning.

If you didn’t check the Apollo link to Wikipedia above, I’ll save you the trouble.

Dig here

You can dig up the Apollo cables at:

1. United Kingdom Bude, Cornwall (50°50′7.8″N 4°33′9″W)

2. France Lannion, Brittany (48°44′47″N 3°32′50″W)

If you’re in the US, they come ashore at:

3. United States Shirley, New York

4. United States Manasquan, New Jersey

Just look for the signs. ‘SECRET CABLE’

How many are there?

‘Today, there are over 420 submarine cables in service, stretching over 700,000 miles (1.1 million km) around the world. The network is clustered around information economy hotspots like Singapore and New York, but cables connect to just about anywhere. Remote Pacific islands, and even obscure ocean towns in the Arctic Circle have such connections.’ — Visual Capitalist

The not-so-connected world

I’m on a boat in the Pacific, and today I suffered from a network failure in Egypt. So much for 420 international cables.

Even the Merseyside Police Force in England were affected — their Facebook address book went down. Because of a cable failure in Egypt FFS!

We really are kidding ourselves. These networks are not resilient. They are vulnerable. Governments have secure satellite comms to carry them through in time of war, until of course the satellites are lasered out of existence.

I have a small satphone aboard, just enough to get me weather data by email when I’m out on the ocean, so I don’t have to trail a network cable. But when I’m in harbour it’s different.

The likes of you and I have to suffer because some terrorist is building sandcastles in the Egyptian desert.

Maybe I should report the ‘non urgent crime’ to Merseyside Police via Twitter.

Oops.

That would depend on a network connection.

Cables do break - there are on average over 100 breakages a year.

And yes, I know. It was probably failure in a network switch or amplifier not a cable. But you can still dig a cable up — I gave you a few locations already.

But volcanoes, earthquakes and tsunamis damage them too.

Are you connected?

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Canonical link: This story was first published in Medium on 8 June 2022 [edited]