Sharks Are Eating the Internet But Not Fucking Fast Enough
It'd be great if furious animals could destroy all the things that make us unhappy: imagine crows picking apart our texts from mom, or a giraffe stomping on bad cops. Luckily, it looks like sharks are devouring the underwater cables that make the internet possible.
The Stack reports that Vietnam recently suffered a major internet outage after one of the fat underwater cables that carries all our whining and googling was damaged:
Vietnam's branch of the Asia-America Gateway (AAG) cable system has today suffered the latest in a series of physical ruptures that have plagued the country over the last year. AAG report that the breakage occurred in the S1H section of the cable, not far from the shores of Ba Ria at the coastal city of Vung Tau.
The connection is one of only five pipes serving a country of 93 million people, and is the network entry point for local providers VNPT, Viettel, SPT and FPT Telecom. The branch of AAG leading to Vietnam is a blind spoke, so neighbouring regions and countries are unaffected. Other recent breakages in the 12,000 mile (20,000 km) trans-Pacific cable have been responsible for similar network blackouts or slow-downs in Asian locations including Hong Kong, the Philippines, Brunei, Singapore and Thailand, as well as Vietnam, in one case requiring 20 days to repair.
The site notes that it could be some run of the mill underwater accident (all sorts of heavy, sharp shit floating around down there), or it could be the work of a shark with a hunger for more than human flesh (a video of said shark can be seen up top):
As AAG's trans-Pacific enemy is thought by some to be the dangerous but fairly apolitical shark, attracted by the electromagnetic field that the cable generates
Wow. We can only pray this shark keeps chomping, bringing us back to a simpler time, when we worked the land instead of content mills, and sharks ruled the seas, instead of warships.
