Acclaimed journalist Samanth Subramanian charts the geopolitical tensions, corporate power grabs, environmental risks, and quiet heroics involved in maintaining the Internet’s unseen circulatory system.
Overview
What if the Internet goes dark?
We think of the Internet as wireless, weightless, ever-present—but its true foundation lies in the ocean’s depths, where nearly 900,000 miles of fiber-optic cables quietly pulse with all the world’s information.
In The Web Beneath the Waves, the acclaimed journalist Samanth Subramanian travels from remote Pacific islands to secretive cable-laying operations to reveal the astonishing world of undersea infrastructure. He reveals the fate of Tonga after a volcanic eruption severs its only undersea link to the Internet, meets the men and women engaged in the fiendishly complex work of laying submarine cables, and scrutinizes the acts of “grey zone warfare,” in which ghost ships cut the cables of other countries.
Subramanian charts the deep geopolitical tensions, corporate power grabs, environmental risks, and quiet heroics involved in maintaining the Internet’s unseen circulatory system. With his signature clarity and curiosity, he brings to life the cables that stitch continents together—and exposes just how vulnerable our connected lives really are. This is narrative nonfiction at its most urgent and eye-opening: a book that asks what happens when the world goes offline, and who controls the switch.
Emily Forlini, writing for PCMag, published a great review of the book today.
When a Volcano Cut This Country’s Fragile Internet Cable, Life Snapped Back to 1880
A single underwater cable the size of a garden hose connected Tonga to the outside world—until a natural disaster struck. And it could happen to anyone.
Excerpts:
It all started with an underwater volcanic eruption. Debris shot into the air, gathering force as it cascaded down the volcano’s flanks, plunged back into the ocean, and sliced Tonga’s only international internet cable in two places, like cutting out the middle of a submarine sandwich.
Now, Tonga was officially alone, with no physical or digital connection to the outside world and no way to call for help.
“I initially thought Tonga would be thrown back, to say, the 1980s, before it had broadband internet,”
says Samanth Subramanian, who tells the full story in his new book, The Web Beneath the Waves, out this week.
“But it was more like they went back to the 1880s, around the time they first laid a telegraph line to Tonga, and they would only receive occasional visitors by ship.”
Thrown back in time, residents resorted to paper record-keeping for banking (no credit cards), traveled door-to-door to speak to each other, and grew their own food.
About the size of a garden hose, subsea cables snake along the seafloor, transporting 95% to 99% of internet traffic, depending on the estimate. They support nearly every aspect of our internet-connected world, making them increasingly critical.
“Over the past 10 years, the internet has grown so central to our lives,” Subramanian says.
“If a cable were cut in 2002, it would be a lot easier to recover from it. But now, there are a lot of things in our lives that depend on it, and for the internet to be taken away would be a big disaster.”
The first few days after the eruption were the most challenging for Tonga’s roughly 100,000 residents. Without the ability to call or text anyone, they struggled to confirm the death toll.
“The first 48 hours were chaos,”
Subramanian says, as residents walked door to door in the hot, humid weather to check on each other.
“The biggest anxiety was not whether the internet would work, it was whether everyone was alive. One government official had to choke back tears when telling me about this time.”
Credit cards no longer worked for purchasing food, and the cash on hand ran out, given the defunct ATMs. The government set up centralized food distribution sites on Tonga’s main street.
There, people would “buy” items on credit, with hand-written records of what they took.
Those in rural areas continued to grow their own food, including those on Vava’u, an example of how those who were less reliant on central, modern systems were most resilient.
Here are a couple of recent articles from this year, 2025, where these Internet cables on the bottom of the sea were cut, disrupting Internet services.
Microsoft cloud services disrupted by Red Sea cable cuts
Excerpts:
Microsoft’s Azure cloud services have been disrupted by undersea cable cuts in the Red Sea, the US tech giant says.
Users of Azure – one of the world’s leading cloud computing platforms – would experience delays because of problems with internet traffic moving through the Middle East, the company said.
Microsoft did not explain what might have caused the damage to the undersea cables, but added that it had been able to reroute traffic through other paths.
Over the weekend, there were reports suggesting that undersea cable cuts had affected the United Arab Emirates and some countries in Asia.
Cables laid on the ocean floor transmit data between continents and are often described as the backbone of the internet.
An update posted on the Microsoft website, external on Saturday said that Azure traffic going through the Middle East “may experience increased latency due to undersea fibre cuts in the Red Sea”.
On Saturday, NetBlocks, an organisation that monitors internet access, said a series of undersea cable cuts in the Red Sea had affected internet services in several countries, including India and Pakistan.
The Pakistan Telecommunication Company said in a post on X that the cuts occurred in waters near the Saudi city of Jeddah and warned that internet services could be affected during peak hours.
When American allies’ undersea cables are severed, suspicion falls on Russia and China
Damage to cables from Taiwan to the Baltic Sea has put communications at risk. It’s unclear who is responsible…
Excerpts:
First the Baltics, now Taiwan. This month, in the latest in a spate of such incidents, crucial undersea cables connecting U.S. allies were damaged or severed.
Some have been cast as acts of sabotage, pinning blame on Russia and China amid heightened geopolitical tensions.
Early this month, Taiwan’s coast guard said it had intercepted the Xing Shun 39 — a Hong Kong-owned freighter carrying the Cameroonian and Tanzanian flags — after Taiwan’s biggest telecom company, Chunghwa Telecom, alerted authorities that an international undersea cable had been damaged on Jan. 3.
With an average of about 200 cable faults a year, according to the International Cable Protection Committee, damage to undersea communications infrastructure is not uncommon. The majority are caused by ship anchors or fishing activity such as trawling, where heavy equipment is dragged across the seafloor.
But the Taiwanese government says this may have been an example of Chinese “gray-zone interference,” irregular military and nonmilitary tactics that aim to wear down an opponent without engaging in an actual shooting war.
It also comes amid an uproar in Europe, where NATO is stepping up patrols of Baltic Sea cables that provide power and enable almost all intercontinental communication, including the internet.
As disastrous as these cable cuts are on the backbone of Internet worldwide traffic, they pale in comparison to cyberattacks, with daily occurrences in the millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, every single day!
The largest one facing the U.S. today is the one I reported on yesterday, the F5 hack that prompted a Federal Cybersecurity Emergency Directive as it affected almost all computer networks in the U.S. Government, as well as the top companies around the world. See:
But these increasing cyberattacks are happening so frequently every single day, that most of them never even appear in your news stream.
These are just a few examples that have happened recently, most of them within the past few days, but you have to go looking for these articles to find them, most of the time.
Cyber attack contingency plans should be put on paper, firms told – BBC
People should plan for potential cyber-attacks by going back to pen and paper, according to the latest advice.
The government has written to chief executives across the country (UK) strongly recommending that they should have physical copies of their plans at the ready as a precaution.
A recent spate of hacks has highlighted the chaos that can ensue when hackers take computer systems down.
The warning comes as the National Cyber-Security Centre (NCSC) reported an increase in nationally significant attacks this year.
Criminal hacks on Marks and Spencer, The Co-op and Jaguar Land Rover have led to empty shelves and production lines being halted this year as the companies struggled without their computer systems.
Organisations need to “have a plan for how they would continue to operate without their IT, (and rebuild that IT at pace), were an attack to get through,” said Richard Horne, chief executive of the NCSC.
Firms are being urged to look beyond cyber-security controls toward a strategy known as “resilience engineering”, which focuses on building systems that can anticipate, absorb, recover, and adapt, in the event of an attack.
Plans should be stored in paper form or offline, the agency suggests, and include information about how teams will communicate without work email and other analogue work arounds.
Cyberattack that crippled Nevada’s systems reveals vulnerability of smaller government agencies to hackers
Excerpts:
Nevada officials revealed Wednesday that personal information may have been compromised in what was described as a “sophisticated ransomware-based cybersecurity attack” that occurred Sunday in which hackers infiltrated government networkers and disrupted essential services statewide.
Several state services were brought to a standstill by the cyberattack. Many people showed up at DMV offices across the state for their appointments this week only to learn the agency is closed. State DMV offices were still closed as of Wednesday.
“We want to remind our citizens that this statewide outage is impacting almost every state agency’s operations, and connectivity to impact safety and the health and human services fields needs to take priority over DMV services,” Tonya Laney, director of the Nevada DMV, said at the news conference.
The outage also prevented law enforcement from accessing state DMV records. For a good part of Sunday, the dispatch phone lines for Nevada State Police were down.
Lombardo had announced Monday that all state offices were closed to in-person services until further notice.
Taiwan flags rise in Chinese cyberattacks, warns of ‘online troll army’
Excerpts:
Chinese cyberattacks on Taiwan government departments have increased by 17% so far this year compared to 2024, reaching an average of 2.8 million per day, data from the National Security Bureau showed.
The bureau warned that Beijing’s “online troll army” was seeking to sow discord among Taiwanese.
Taiwan’s Government Service Network received an average of 2.8 million daily attacks so far this year, up from 2.4 million in 2024, according to Reuters calculations based on a report by the National Security Bureau.
The report to parliament, a copy of which was reviewed by Reuters ahead of a parliamentary session on Wednesday, said medical systems, defence, telecommunications and energy were among the top targets of the “systemic cyberattacks”.
“Beyond intelligence theft, these operations integrate dark web, internet forum, and media channels to disseminate fabricated content, eroding public confidence in the government’s cyber defences,” the report said.
Russian cyber-attacks against Nato states up by 25% in a year, analysis finds
Excerpts:
Russia has increased cyber-attacks against Nato states by 25% over the past year, according to an analysis, as the Kremlin escalates its “hybrid war” against European countries.
Microsoft said nine of the top 10 countries most affected by Russian state cyber-activity were members of the Nato alliance and attacks against them had risen by a quarter compared with the previous year.
The US was the most targeted region, at 20% of all attacks, followed by the UK at 12% and Ukraine – the only non-Nato member in the top 10 – at 11%.
Cyberattack by pro-Hamas activists hits multiple Canadian airports
Excerpts:
Multiple investigations are underway after hackers gained access to public facing information systems at three different Canadian airports, including two in B.C.
The cyberbreach briefly delayed some flights at Kelowna International Airport on Tuesday after hackers gained access to terminal information screens and the public address system shortly after 5:00 p.m.
The screens displayed pro-Hamas messaging saying, “Israel lost the war, Hamas won.”
The displays also referred to U.S. President Donald Trump as a “pig.”
Whoever gained access to the airport’s systems also took over the public address speakers to play audio messages.
Dairy Farmers of America confirms June cyberattack leaked personal data
Excerpts:
The Dairy Farmers of America said cybercriminals breached company systems in June, gaining access to the information of employees and members of the cooperative.
The organization previously confirmed to the outlet Dairy Herd Management in June that multiple manufacturing plants within its network were dealing with a ransomware attack. A notorious ransomware gang took credit for the incident days after the statement was released.
On Thursday, the organization filed breach notifications with regulators in Maine explaining that the personal information of 4,546 people was exposed during the attack.
The information stolen includes names, Social Security numbers, driver’s license or state-issued ID numbers, dates of birth, bank account numbers, and Medicare or Medicaid numbers.
The Kansas-based organization is a farmer-owned dairy cooperative that markets and sells milk and ancillary products produced by its 9,500 farmer-owners.
It has about 19,000 employees and reported $24.5 billion in revenue in 2022, producing about 23% of all U.S. milk.
Major global auction house Sotheby’s has confirmed having its data compromised following a July cyberattack, The Register reports.
Unauthorized access to Sotheby’s systems on July 24 facilitated the exfiltration of individuals’ names, Social Security numbers, and financial account details, said the London-founded and New York-headquartered auction firm in a filing with the Office of the Maine Attorney General’s Office.
Sotheby’s emphasized that the breach occurred despite its layered data security defenses.
Sotheby’s disclosure comes more than a year after fellow auction house Christie’s was attacked by the RansomHub ransomware gang, which had sold the pilfered data to a private buyer.
Kearney Public Schools addresses cyberattack impact
Excerpts:
After receiving our final report from our Fortinet Incident Response Team, the hacking organization, Interlock, has publicly taken claim for and verified to have accessed sensitive data of current and former KPS staff and Special Education students.
The Interlock organization has targeted hundreds of businesses and educational institutions across the United States, and in many cases, pursued a financial “ransom”.
Files That Were Accessed:
•A finance folder containing staff information for current and former staff (2005 – present). This information includes names, addresses, birthdate, social security numbers, drivers license numbers, passports, bank account information, and bank routing numbers.
•A Special Education folder including HIPPA and FERPA information from 2009 forward with student names, addresses, disability information, and medicaid lists with ID numbers.
•A file from 2016 that included standard public directory information: student names, parent names, and addresses from that year.
Cybersecurity Workforce Shortage: 4 Million Unfilled Jobs
A year ago, in summer of 2024, one of the largest IT outages to date at that time did make headline news, the Microsoft Crowdstrike software update that took down 8.5 million devices worldwide, and it wasn’t even a cyberattack! It was actually a cybersecurity software update for a program that is supposed to STOP cyberattacks, and was pushed across the Internet to millions of computers worldwide, costing $billions in lost revenue and repairs.
I published a few articles about this. See:
One Single Computer Glitch Could Cost Tens of $Billions of Losses, Showing How Frail Technology Has Become
Excerpts:
This past Friday morning brought headlines such as “Largest IT Outage in History!” and “Just Like Y2K Except this Time it is Real!”
Hundred of millions, if not billions, of people and businesses around the world were affected, from airlines to FedEx and other delivery companies to financial institutions to hotel reservations and personal PC users.
The culprit was reported as a Microsoft Windows update to a software program that runs on many Windows computers, from the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.
Microsoft has reported that the glitch affected 8.5 million devices.
As I researched this last year, I found out that there are huge shortages in cybersecurity professionals whose job is to protect against cyberattacks. See:
Lack of IT-Skilled Human Workers is Leading to a Cyber Pandemic – 500,000 Cybersecurity Jobs Unfilled in the U.S.
Excerpts:
As the full effects of the Microsoft glitch that took down so many businesses and government agencies this past Friday are still being evaluated, the vulnerability of a software system run by a cybersecurity firm is presenting new information to hackers and exposing just how unprepared the U.S. Government is to protect our country against cyber attacks that are a real threat to national security.
After the CrowdStrike failed software update that infected 8.1 million devices with cascading effects spreading to millions, if not billions, of other devices and computer systems, the threat of a Cyber Pandemic is now very real.
And the main reason that the U.S. Government is powerless to stop something like a Cyber Pandemic is not because of a lack of technology or computer resources, since the U.S. is home to the largest technology companies in the world, but it is due to a lack of human resources: Cybersecurity professionals.
In 2021 CNN published an article with the title: Wanted: Millions of cybersecurity pros. Salary: Whatever you want
The article highlighted the increasing cyber attacks in the U.S. and the lack of cybersecurity experts to prevent these attacks.
Fast forward to today in 2024, and the situation has only become worse.
A few weeks ago (June, 2024), members of Congress raised concerns over the shortage of cybersecurity professionals, which has now grown to a half million open jobs that cannot be filled. (Full article.)
A year later now, has the situation become better?
Nope. It’s still getting worse.
Everyone in IT knows that the best IT jobs are NOT with the U.S. Government, but in the private sector, and today the best paying jobs in IT in the private sector are still in the area of AI, as we continue to pump up the AI bubble that is growing larger and larger every day.
So what motivation does a young college graduate in IT have to go work for the government to become a cybersecurity expert when Zuckerberg will give them $290K to work on AI models?
Cybersecurity Workforce Shortage: A Comprehensive 2025 Study
Excerpts:
The global cybersecurity industry is expanding at breakneck speed, but talent supply isn’t keeping pace. Despite over 4 million unfilled roles globally in 2025, the pipeline of qualified professionals remains critically underdeveloped.
Organizations across healthcare, finance, defense, and tech are now scrambling to secure infrastructure against increasingly sophisticated cyber threats—with not nearly enough skilled defenders to go around.
This workforce shortage is no longer a future concern. It’s a present crisis that’s costing enterprises millions in breach-related losses, delayed incident responses, and internal compliance failures.
This is a national disaster just waiting to happen, and the Federal Government’s warning yesterday is proof that most of our networks across this country could easily go down at any time now.
AI and computer technology could most certainly destroy our lives, but not because they are smarter than us and will replace us, but because there is a shortage of human laborers to fix all these systems when they break down and fail.
Learn the lesson from Tonga, which has already seen what happens when the whole system crashes, and they were thrust back to the 1880s.
