A submarine cable cut between the Philippines and Singapore disrupted Internet services across the country, prompting Globe, PLDT and Converge ICT Solutions to reroute traffic through alternative international links.
The disruption reduced available international bandwidth, resulting in slower Internet speeds, higher latency, and intermittent performance when accessing some online services, particularly those hosted outside the Philippines.
Globe said it began rerouting traffic Thursday night through redundant and other international links to maintain services for mobile, broadband and corporate customers. Repairs to the affected subsea fiber are expected to take several weeks.
“Our teams are working continuously to ease congestion and restore normal internet service as quickly as possible. In parallel, we are working with our partners to validate the cause of the disruption,” said Joel Agustin, SVP and head of Network Planning and Engineering at Globe.
PLDT separately confirmed that a submarine cable cut between the Philippines and Singapore had affected its services nationwide.
“A submarine cable cut between the Philippines and Singapore has affected services nationwide,” PLDT said in an advisory issued at 9:30 p.m. on Oct. 2.
“PLDT has successfully rerouted most of the affected traffic and expects service to normalize shortly. We shall provide updates on our restoration efforts as they come,” the telco added.
Converge ICT Solutions also said it had successfully shifted Internet and data traffic affected by the cable cut to other submarine cable systems.
“Matagumpay nang nai-reroute sa ibang submarine cables ang aming Internet at data traffic papunta at mula sa Singapore na naapektuhan ng submarine cable cut sa pagitan ng Pilipinas at Singapore,” Converge said.
The company said its technical teams were continuing to monitor the network to keep connections to applications and websites hosted in Singapore stable.
The UP Diliman Network Helpdesk also issued an advisory saying it had been informed that an undersea cable segment between the Philippines and Singapore was offline.
“Since most of our upstream ISPs connect through these major information pipelines, please expect increased latencies and intermittent performance, especially if the sites being accessed are hosted offshore,” the helpdesk said.
“This is not a UPD-specific issue, and other local ISPs and telcos may experience slowdowns as well, depending on where their primary link is,” it added.
Globe said its primary IT systems remained operational. A separate issue that earlier affected access to some applications, particularly during login using Android phones, had already been resolved.
