Comment by danbruc

This is the P in CAP theorem: partition awareness.

I used to work on distributed systems, and network partitions were a frequent enough occurrence that they weren’t considered an extraordinary event. By that, I mean that we wouldn’t page during network partitions because it was still considered normal system operation. Our design was designed from the ground up to consider network partitions as a frequent and normal operational state.

What we did do is watch SLAs. If the network partition continued for too long, then our data quality would degrade over time. So we would page based on data quality.

I don’t know the answer to the actual question you asked, I would be curious to know, too.

According to experts, there have been no cable breaks of this type for over a decade in the Baltic Sea and now suddenly there have been about 5 in just 1,5 year, at a time when ruzzia is conducting aggressive hybrid warfare and the last 2 ships discovered were also Chinese ships, a country that supports ruzzia and one ship had a ruzzian captain and they also seem to belong to the ruzzian shadow fleet.

Several of the ships have also gone to / from ruzzian ports and behaved strangely, for example zig zagged over the cable before, turned off the transponder, drifted around etc. which ships do not normally do.

Suddenly, cable breaks in the Baltic Sea are 26 times higher than in the rest of the world, it can not be dismissed as "accidents". These cables have not broken by chance, according to experts, but this is a deliberate act.

A quick internet search suggests that these are indeed frequent:

« Between 2007 and 2010, 53 telecoms faults were recorded around the UK, 19 of which were caused by anchors »

« Various modes of fishing involving placement of heavy gear on the seabed result in 50 to 100 faults a year, typically in water depths shallower than 1500m »

from https://www.iscpc.org/documents/?id=201

You could easily find other sources and statistics.

If you have never been at sea, it may sound extraordinary that an anchor or a fishing net could by chance damage a cable, but you would be quite far from the truth. You could read this report on one case about a ship dragging anchor over a cable: https://www.marineinsight.com/shipping-news/operator-of-ship... and complete it with video from youtube of how life looks like in a cargo ship under a storm, to form a better picture of what it's like.

Also, all of the investigations on recent cases that's been pushed on top of the press for some reason, concluded on accidental damage. As always, it is recommanded to read professional newssources rather than political ones. For instance, you could search for "site:www.marineinsight.com cable damage"

Finally, I can see how all this noise can be used by NATO to justify strengthening their presence in the baltic see, but I fail to see the advantage for Russia. Let's be clear, I'm certain there are many russian agents in the west trying to sabotage west politics and mess with public opinions etc... but creating a few more incidents of cable damage on the baltic sea? How is that helping exactly? The disruption that could be caused is probably less than the cost of the seized ship.

For such a obviously political topic, believing that there exist an unadulterated pathway for information to flow from an event happening at the bottom of the sea up to your favorite internet news corporation seams uterly silly.

Wonder if there's any industry reports on if there's more demand for subcable repair/servicing than typical/projected.

Happens very often: rarer than land breaks but still on the order of multiple a year. Pay for low latency links and you’ll be exposed to this unreasonable fact. I have a hatred for Chinese fishing trawlers not for their destruction of food stock but for their propensity to ruin my day by predictably damaging the EAC-C2C system.