Why it disrupts so much
International traffic reroutes onto remaining capacity, which congests. The symptom for users is not an outage but everything foreign becoming slow at once.
The repair timeline
A repair ship must be dispatched, the fault located, the cable raised from the seabed, spliced and re-laid. Weather and vessel availability routinely make this a multi-week process.
What reduces the impact
Hosting locally for a local audience, multiple upstream providers, and caching static assets so a degraded international link is not on the critical path.
