02 | The links

What has cut Pacific links, and how long repairs took

1. January 2022

   An undersea volcanic eruption and tsunami damage Tonga's main internet cable. Tongans rely on makeshift satellite service until the cable is reconnected on February 22, about 5 weeks later, after about 90 km of cable is replaced. A second cable, to the outer islands, could take up to 9 months to repair.

2. February 2 and 8, 2023

   Both undersea cables serving Taiwan's Matsu islands, home to about 14,000 people, are cut. Residents fall back on a microwave radio link where texts can take hours, and the earliest a cable ship can arrive is April 20. Taiwan's authorities have since said 2 Chinese vessels caused the cuts and that there was no evidence Beijing deliberately tampered with the cables.

3. May 2023

   Typhoon Mawar hits Guam with winds of 140 mph over 72 hours. At Andersen Air Force Base, the wind strips parts of the data center roof and rain gets inside.

4. February 25, 2025

   Minutes after the Hong Tai 58, a ship registered in Togo, leaves the area, Taiwan's coast guard learns that a cable linking Taiwan to the Penghu Islands has been severed. In June, a Taiwanese court sentences the captain to 3 years in prison under Taiwan's Telecommunications Management Act. Taiwan reported 36 cases of cable damage in its waters from 2019 through 2023.

5. April 29, 2026

   Taiwan says the cable linking Dongyin to Beigan has broken after weather apparently shifted a shipwreck onto it. A microwave backup carries voice and internet traffic, and repairs are expected by the end of July.

In each cable case, the island fell back to a smaller path, microwave radio or satellite, and waited weeks or months for a repair. Few ships can do the work. In 2023, the earliest a cable ship could reach Matsu was April 20, more than 10 weeks after the second cut.

03 | The storm

Typhoon Mawar put the data center itself at risk.

Mawar hit Guam in May 2023 with winds of 140 mph and more than 2 feet of rain over 72 hours. At about 2:30 a.m. on May 25, the wind stripped parts of the roof from the data center at Andersen Air Force Base, and rain came in.

The 8 airmen who stayed inside kept the base's 157 long haul circuits, its line to Washington, and its network control center running. They held the doors with sandbags and duct tape, removed about 140 gallons of water with buckets, mops, and their own shirts, and checked for leaks and fires every 30 minutes. Air & Space Forces Magazine reported that the base kept full connectivity on its unclassified and classified networks through the storm.

Months later, parts of Guam still had rolling blackouts. The network held because people stayed with it. A site that may be cut off for months also needs a room that keeps water out, power that runs without the island grid, and equipment rated for heat, humidity, and salt air.

04 | The site

Build each site to run until the repair ship arrives

Our degraded reachback article covers the 4 questions every base should answer: which applications run locally, how many days of storage it holds, which links fail over, and who sets traffic priority. Dispersed Pacific sites add 5 more, because they are small, far apart, and hard to resupply.

Roll it out the way you would field any new system: pilot at 1 or 2 sites, fix what the pilots find, then build the rest from the same configuration. For physical damage at a fixed base, our base network survivability article covers second nodes, separate power, and failover drills.

05 | How we help

Where Dell Federal and Paragon Micro fit

As a Dell Technologies Federal Platinum Partner and multi-vendor technology provider, we build deployable compute, storage, and communications kits that keep a small site working when its link home is thin or gone, and we test each kit before it ships.

Answers for Pacific planners

Dispersed operations: common questions

Reference desk

Sources and further reading

Public sources as reviewed October 22, 2026. Cable repair estimates change with weather and ship availability; confirm current conditions before you plan around them.