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Retrospective · Tonga, January 2022 · published

Tonga: the volcano that cut a country off

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On 15 January 2022 the undersea volcano Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha'apai exploded in one of the largest eruptions ever recorded. It also tore apart the single cable that connected Tonga to the rest of the world. For more than five weeks, a whole country was almost completely offline.

What happened

  • 15 Jan 2022 The eruption and the tsunami it caused cut Tonga's only international fibre cable, which runs to Fiji. Phone calls and internet abroad stopped almost entirely; only limited satellite links remained.
  • The following weeks A repair ship found that the cable had not been cut cleanly but shredded: a section of roughly 55 km could not be found at all. Bad weather and the extent of the damage pushed back the first repair estimates.
  • 22 Feb 2022 Internet service returned on the main islands, Tongatapu and 'Eua, after about five weeks; reports count 38 to 40 days offline. Some outer islands stayed on satellite links for longer.

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Why it mattered

For days after the disaster, the world did not know how badly Tonga had been hit, and Tongans abroad could not reach their families. It was a stark reminder that many small countries hang on a single cable, and it pushed the region to invest in backup routes and satellite capacity.

What Blackout Map would show

Tonga would turn black as soon as the cable broke, and our cable data (from GeoCables) shows on the country page how many cables a country depends on. The "Natural disasters" layer would show the eruption on the map next to it. See Tonga's outage history.

Sources

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Blackout Map is a live map of internet outages and shutdowns around the world. Open the map · Security watch · RSS · Follow us on X: @Blackoutmap_net

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