Vava'u and Ha'apai suffer third cable blackout

A total communications failure on Tonga's only inter-island domestic submarine cable has disrupted normal telephone and internet services to the outer islands since 29 June and it is likely to be several weeks before it is known how long it might take for normal services to be restored. In the meantime, the local providers are running on low bandwidth satellite links with limited capacity. It is Tonga's third major internet outage, following the severely disruptive national and domestic cable blackouts in 2019 and 2022.