Data and sources
Where the information on this site comes from, how much weight each source carries, and how you can reuse our records.
Datasets
- Cable routes, landing points, owners, lengths, service dates
- TeleGeography’s Submarine Cable Map.
- Land, borders and country names
- Natural Earth 1:50m.
- Satellite map
- Zoomed out, NASA Blue Marble (NASA GIBS); countries and coasts, Sentinel-2 cloudless by EOX IT Services GmbH (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0; contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data). Both served from our own domain. Zoomed right in, when available: Esri World Imagery with road and place names (Esri, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics, and the GIS User Community), loaded from Esri.
- Route latency
- RIPE Atlas public measurements between probes and anchor servers near each city; plus our own SmokePing server on some routes.
- Cable-related outages
- Cloudflare Radar outage annotations.
- Cable ship positions
- Ships’ own AIS broadcasts, received on land via aisstream.io worldwide, plus two national open feeds for their own seas: Fintraffic (Finland and the Baltic; Source: Fintraffic / digitraffic.fi, license CC 4.0 BY) and the Norwegian Coastal Administration (Norwegian waters, Svalbard and Jan Mayen; Norwegian Licence for Open Government Data, NLOD); kept 30 days. Ship list after the International Cable Protection Committee’s “Cableships of the world” (facts only). Where a ship wasn’t heard, its estimated route follows the sea lanes of Eurostat’s SeaRoute network (EUPL-1.2, built on Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Global Shipping Lane Network).
- Ship photos
- Wikimedia Commons, credited on each photo.
- Conditions near faults
- Earthquakes from USGS, cyclones from GDACS, sea conditions from the Open-Meteo marine model, outage signals from IODA (Georgia Tech), navigation warnings from NGA.
Cable routes are drawn by TeleGeography and are approximate (see Terms).
Sources we cite and monitor
| Publisher | Type | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| Japan Coast Guard | maritime notice | Operator / owner |
| Malaysia Marine Department | maritime notice | Operator / owner |
| ABC News | news | Reliable |
| Aus Internet | isp status | Reliable |
| Chunghwa Telecom | operator news | Reliable |
| Converge Digest | news | Reliable |
| DCD | news | Reliable |
| GSL Networks | network operator | Reliable |
| Launtel | isp status | Reliable |
| Light Reading | news | Reliable |
| Ministry of Digital Affairs (Taiwan) | regulator | Reliable |
| PNG DataCo | operator news | Reliable |
| Philippine Daily Inquirer | news | Reliable |
| SUBCO (Bevan Slattery, founder) | social | Reliable |
| Superloop | operator news | Reliable |
| Telecompaper | news | Reliable |
| Tom's Hardware | news | Reliable |
| VOV (Voice of Vietnam) | news | Reliable |
| Vocus | operator news | Reliable |
| iTnews | news | Reliable |
| AUNS | news | Unverified |
How the weights are decided is on How we verify. Measurement platforms show that traffic was disrupted, never which cable failed, so they are cited for impact only.
Download and reuse our records
Our incident records (facts, timelines and summaries) are free to reuse under CC BY 4.0. Credit “Submarine Cable Status” with a link.
- All incidents as CSV, for spreadsheets
- JSON API, with every source and estimate
- RSS feed of incident updates
Licences and credits
Cable data © TeleGeography, licensed CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (non-commercial, share-alike). Cloudflare Radar data is CC BY-NC 4.0. Natural Earth is public domain. Ship photos keep their own Commons licence, shown on each photo. Third-party material is quoted briefly and linked, not republished; operator network maps appear only with the operator’s written permission.
The site’s design, code and branding are not openly licensed; see Terms and privacy. The map is drawn with MapLibre.