Failure of the SMW5 submarine optical cable from Southeast Asia to Europe may affect network access for domestic users

According to information posted by netizens on Bluepoint.com, the submarine optical cables from Singapore to Marseille and Singapore to Sofia have failed since April 19, 2024. This failure has caused domestic visits to Europe to be detoured to the United States. During peak periods, packet loss and RTT increases, etc.

A search on Blue Dot Network found that the source of the news came from the server provider DMIT, which forwarded the anomalies in Hong Kong's international Internet lines summarized by RETN. Two of the new notifications were from Singapore to Marseille and from Singapore to Sofia.

After further searching for information, Blue Dot found that the fault was the Southeast Asia-Middle East-Europe No. 5 submarine optical cable (SEA-ME-WE 5, SMW5). This submarine optical cable starts from Singapore and passes through Indonesia, Malaysia, Bangladesh, and the Middle East. Multi-country, entering Europe from the Red Sea, the latest design capacity is 38Tbps.

The picture below shows the route tracking of Ningbo Telecom to Frankfurt:

Its SMW5 Alliance is composed of 19 leading international telecommunications operators, including China Mobile International, China Telecom International, China Unicom, Singapore Telecom, Sri Lanka Telecom, Telecom Malaysia, Telecom Egypt, etc.

At around 12 noon on April 19, 2024 (UTC +08:00), the SMW5 submarine optical cable was interrupted in an area 440 kilometers away from Singapore. After the interruption, a large amount of international traffic was blocked, and the relevant operators rerouted the traffic to the SMW4 submarine cable. fiber optic cable to maintain operations.

Although this submarine optical cable starts in Singapore, part of the domestic international traffic bound for Europe is also exported from Hong Kong to Singapore and then to Europe through SMW5. Therefore, after the failure of this submarine optical cable, both domestic export traffic and Hong Kong export traffic are bypassed. OK.

Bluepoint Network tests show that China Telecom's international traffic to Europe directly bypasses the United States, while traffic to Singapore may bypass the United States and then to Hong Kong and then to Singapore. Anyway, the current routing situation is quite chaotic.

Therefore, users may encounter problems such as slow speed or abnormal loading when accessing websites or services located in Europe. The SMW5 operator has also contacted the ship for maintenance, but the specific maintenance time is still under evaluation.

More test data: Testing with ITDOG TraceRoute