Tonga’s broken international submarine fibre optic cable should be fixed by midday Saturday, if all goes to plan, according to the operations team on board the cable repair ship Reliance. The cable blackout is entering Day 13 on Saturday.

Tonga Cable Ltd CEO, Edwin Liava’a said work is underway to splice the cable, which will take up to 18 hours.

“The work to splice the cable on Tonga’s side started at 7:00am this morning.”

“After the splice, several tests will be conducted which will take up to 10 hours. By midday tomorrow the international submarine cable should be back online if there will be no major complications.”

This means communications service providers are likely to revert their systems to the fibre optic cable by tomorrow evening, which is Day 13 of the internet cable blackout.

Meanwhile, Piveni Piukala, a member of the Board of Directors of Tonga Cable Ltd, told The Associated Press that an oil tanker was identified in the area when the cable was cut on Sunday January 20, and they would work with port authorities and police to determine if there was any negligence involved.

No further statements have been made by Tonga Cable Ltd. about the status of the domestic cable connecting Tongatapu and Vava’u. They earlier reported that it was broken at the same time as the international cable.