Vietnam faces a major internet blackout with three undersea cables down, sparking sabotage suspicions amid geopolitical tensions.

According to the Vietnam News Agency, there have been significant internet outages this week due to the failure of three of Vietnam’s five international undersea internet cables. This marks the second significant outage in the nation in less than a year.

The Intra Asia (IA) cable had an incident on its S1 branch connecting to Singapore while problems on the Asia Pacific Gateway (APG) and the Asia-Africa-Europe-1 (AAE-1) have not been fixed yet.

The failure of the three cable systems has seriously affected the speed of Vietnam’s international internet connections, with internet users having found it difficult to access websites and network services with servers abroad.

-VNA 

The five submarine fiber optic cables that connect Vietnam to the rest of the globe are the APG, IA, AAE-1, Southeast Asia-Middle East-Western Europe (SMW-3), and Asia-America Gateway (AAG).

Internet service providers nationwide, according to VNA, have “rolled out various measures to ensure internet connections for users, including capitalizing on fiber optic cables on land and sharing traffic between internationally connected fiber optic lines.”

The local media source did not give an explanation for the occurrence or an estimated time of repair.

We don’t want to conjecture about possible sabotage, but earlier this year, there were rumors that suggested the Houthis, who are backed by Iran, may have cut internet connections in the Red Sea.

A group of Wall Street Journal reporters were briefed by US State Department officials approximately a month ago about the growing dangers that Chinese ships could use to destroy underwater cables due to territorial disputes in the South China Sea.

Recently, GreatGameIndia reported that according to Al Mayadeen News, the Houthis have damaged several undersea internet cables, causing significant disruptions, especially in Gulf countries and India.