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“There’s a priority on who gets his cable fixed first,” says Madory. “Countries pay a little premium to get repaired first.” When one of these ships arrives at the scene, which can take days, it drops a hook to hook into the cable that runs along the seafloor. The hooked cable, which can be as thin as a regular garden hose while in the deep ocean, is then lifted onto the boat’s deck, where technicians work to fix the gap. “The wiring itself isn’t the most robust thing,” says Kaufmann. It is then slowly lowered into the water. “This process hasn’t changed much in 150 years, so much so that we have submarine cables,” Madory says.

Of course, there are unifying factors that can complicate the process. Tonga is likely to be surrounded by ships seeking to bring aid to the country; this could mean internet cables are left in the background to save lives, restore electricity and supply vital food and water. The precise location of the break can also complicate things: generally, the farther the break is from shore, the deeper the cable – and the harder it is to reach the ground and drag it above the ground. That’s before you consider that the power lines on land that help keep the connection online can be damaged beyond easy repair. “Tonga is one of the extremes of the internet,” says Madory. “Once you get out of the center of the internet, you’ll have fewer options.”

Internet outage shows how dependent the world’s internet connectivity can be at single points of failure. “It’s one of those stories that refutes the idea that the internet is designed to withstand nuclear wars,” says Alan Woodward, professor of cybersecurity at the University of Surrey in England. “Gumball holds most things together.” Woodward suggests that rare physical events such as volcanic eruptions are difficult to conceive, but countries should try to maintain redundancy through multiple submarine connections and ideally those taking different routes so that a local event does not affect more than one line.

Still, redundancy doesn’t come cheap, especially for a small country of over 100,000 people like Tonga. In a big explosion like this, the movement of the seabed could cause a crack to form in any secondary cable, even if it was laid on the other side of Tonga.

“There’s a broader message about infrastructure resilience,” says Andrew Bennett, who analyzes internet policy at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. “While the UK or the US will not be like Tonga, geopolitical tensions and debates are mounting.[around] discussing things like undersea cables that push us to a more sinister place. You don’t want to end up in a place where you have sovereign wires for allies and other wires for everyone else. ”

Bennett suggests two options for closing the link gap. One is the rapid spread of satellite internet, and satellite constellations are being launched into space as we speak. The other is to devote more money to the problem. “If you look at flexible internet infrastructure as a public good, countries that can afford it must pay for it and provide it to others,” he says. Closing the global digital divide by 2030 costs only 0.2% of gross national income Number of OECD countries per year by institute.

Considering the internet is increasingly seen as a fourth vital service along with heat, electricity and water, such a long outage for 100,000 people is catastrophic, compounding the immediate physical effects of the explosion. And it highlights the fragility of certain parts of the internet, especially outside the wealthy Western world. “The internet doesn’t necessarily have to be fragmented at its core,” Woodward says. “But it will always be a little frayed around the edges.”