When Submarine Cables Go Dark: Understanding and Preparing for the Risks of Taiwan's International Internet Disconnection

A research study from Open Culture Foundation (OCF), funded by APNIC Foundation's ISIF Asia grant, measures how dependent Taiwan's commonly-used websites are on foreign internet infrastructure and submarine cables. Using a headless browser to analyze homepage resource requests across 2,179 tested sites (from a pool of 2,507), the study classifies sites into three risk categories: 39.3% 'foreign-dependent' (direct foreign resource requests, highest failure risk), 49.6% 'cloud-dependent' (relying on Taiwan-based nodes of multinational clouds like GCP, AWS, Cloudflare, with uncertain real availability), and only 11.2% 'locally-contained'. Government (.gov.tw) and education (.edu.tw) sites show much lower foreign dependency (6.8% and 13.3% respectively) than the general population. The study contextualizes this with historical cable-cut incidents (2006 Hengchun earthquake, 2023 and 2025 Matsu cable cuts, a 2025-2026 multi-cable earthquake event) and argues satellite backups like LEO constellations (Starlink, Taiwan's planned B5G program) cannot replace cable bandwidth at scale. It recommends resilience planning examine resource supply chains and cloud control planes, not just physical hosting location.

Source: https://resilience.ocf.tw/web/report/en.html. 8 Sync News only summarizes and links out; content copyright belongs to the authors and original sources.