PLDT says its services have fully normalized nationwide after a submarine cable cut between the Philippines and Singapore disrupted connections on October 2.
In its first advisory at 9:30 p.m. on October 2, PLDT said the cut had affected services nationwide. The company said it had already rerouted most of the affected traffic and expected service to normalize shortly.
A second advisory at 4:30 p.m. on October 4 declared full restoration of network services.
PLDT did not name the cable system involved, the location of the break or the cause.
Why one cable can slow a whole country
Most of the internet traffic Filipinos use every day, from streaming and cloud apps to video calls, travels on fiber-optic cables laid across the seabed. When one of these international links breaks, operators shift traffic onto their other routes. That is what PLDT means by rerouting.
It works like closing one lane of a highway. Cars still get through on the remaining lanes, but until the extra capacity is sorted out, users can feel slower speeds or patchy access to services hosted abroad.
Repairing a subsea cable itself usually takes much longer than restoring service, because it requires a specialized repair ship to locate and splice the damaged section. Restoration in this case came from rerouting rather than from fixing the cable.
What to watch
The incident is a reminder of how much the country relies on a limited number of international cable routes. Telecom Philippines will update this story if PLDT or other operators release details on the affected system or the repair timeline.
Source: PLDT advisory