Tonga's only domestic submarine cable has suffered a massive outage, which has severely impacted telephone and Internet services to the outer islands since June 29.

According to Matangi Tonga, disruption is expected to last for several weeks.

It's the third major subsea cable outage that the Tonga Domestic Cable has suffered since 2019.

A timeframe for repair work has not been given.

The outage was likely caused by an earthquake that happened on June 29, after which services were impacted.

Tonga Cable Acting CEO, Sosafate Kolo, told a media conference last week that the local telcos have since switched to satellite with limited capacity, in the meantime.

Matungi Tonga reports that the earthquake occurred at 2:00 am, before the communications issue to Vava'u and Ha’apai happened at 2:43 am, before a total outage at around 3:30 am.

"We think that multiple landslides resulting from the earthquake happened at 2:43 am, and another landslide close to 3:30 am that might have completely cut the cable," he said.

Kolo said the two faults on the cable are located at 73 km and 96 km from Tongatapu.

A repair vessel has left Singapore and is expected to arrive in Tonga during the second half of this month, added Kolo. The extent of the damage to the subsea cable is not yet known, meaning a firm timeframe for repairs has not been provided.

Digicel Tonga, a carrier on the island lost connectivity to all services, including voice, SMS, and data services in both Vava'u and Ha’apai following the earthquake.

A day later, Digicel was able to get their backup satellite services working in Vava’u, to switch on voice, SMS, and data services, however, not in the same capacity as they normally had. By July 2, the telco did the same in Ha'apai.

Previous subsea woes

Tonga has suffered previous issues with its Domestic Cable, in 2019 and 2022.

In 2019, it was alleged that a ship's anchor caused $1.2 million of damage to both the international and domestic cables near Nuku'alofa, leading to an Internet blackout from January 20 to February 6.

However, three years later Tonga would suffer an even worse connectivity outage, when a large underwater volcano erupted close to the country in January 2022, triggering tsunamis reaching heights of almost three meters in places.

This led to a cable break that would take 18 months to repair and was only repaired in July 2023.

Both the international Tonga Cable – laid in 2013 and running 827km to Fiji – and the Tonga Domestic Cable connecting the islands of Vavaʻu, Lifuka, and Tongatapu were damaged. The island nation’s international cable was repaired a month after the eruption.

In total, the amount of cable used in reconnecting the cable system was just over 108km, according to Tonga Cable Limited (TCL), which had to wait for the replacement cable to arrive from France.