Interactive submarine cable failure simulator. Cut cables on a globe, watch traffic reroute, see which cities lose bandwidth.
Select a historical scenario or enter Cut Mode to sever cables yourself. The app computes which metros lose connectivity, how much bandwidth disappears, where traffic reroutes, and whether the network absorbs the cut.
Cut Mode: press C or tap the Cut Mode button, then click any cable. The cable splits at the click point with a visible gap. The entire broken cable turns muted red. Undo with Ctrl+Z or the Undo button. Cuts snap precisely to the cable path.
Scenarios: 10 documented real-world events with exact cut locations, historical date filtering, and source links. The simulation uses only cables that existed at the time of each event.
Built on real data: 594 operational cables from TeleGeography (110 with verified capacity from primary sources), 930 metro nodes, 151 hand-researched terrestrial backbone edges, 92 hub metros, and a graph engine that runs in a Web Worker.
pnpm install
pnpm devOpen http://localhost:5173.
The static JSON data files are pre-built in public/data/. To regenerate from TeleGeography's API:
pnpm data:fetch # ~2 min — downloads 692 cable details with rate limiting
pnpm data:build # ~1 sec — clusters metros, estimates capacity, writes JSONpnpm test # 41 integration tests (simulation accuracy for all 10 scenarios)
pnpm test:e2e # 44 Puppeteer E2E tests across desktop + mobile viewports| Data | Source | License |
|---|---|---|
| Cable routes & landing stations | TeleGeography Submarine Cable Map | CC BY-SA |
| Cable capacity | 110 cables with verified/estimated capacity from press releases and industry sources. Remaining ~484 use an RFS-year heuristic (see build-data.ts). |
-- |
| Terrestrial backbone edges | Hand-curated from industry publications. 127 of 151 edges have source URLs. | -- |
| Chokepoint definitions | Hand-defined polygons from geographic research | -- |
Every capacity number has a confidence level (verified, estimated, approximated). Click "About" in the app for methodology, or click any cable or terrestrial link on the map to see its specific source.
- Build a weighted graph: metros as nodes, cable segments + terrestrial links as edges weighted by capacity (Tbps)
- Compute baseline metrics: each metro's aggregate bandwidth to 92 global hub metros via capacity-weighted bottleneck shortest paths
- On cut: remove edges at the cut location, recompute metrics, diff against baseline
- BFS from cut segments along each cable's topology to determine which portions are severed
- Report per-metro: bandwidth loss %, latency change, path diversity, rerouting paths
Graph engine runs in a Web Worker. Full simulation completes in <200ms.
The map uses a three-layer visual system:
| Visual | Color | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Cut marker (red dot) | Bright red | Where the break is |
| Severed cable | Muted red | Entire cable is broken |
| Isolated metro | Magenta + large dot | Completely offline |
| Severe loss metro | Orange | >50% bandwidth lost |
| Degraded metro | Amber | >10% bandwidth lost |
| Active terrestrial | Bright cyan | Absorbing rerouted traffic |
The simulation is tested against 10 documented real-world cable cut events:
| Event | Year | Key result | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|
| Red Sea (Houthi) | 2024 | 3 cables cut (AAE-1, EIG, SEACOM), 25% Asia-Europe traffic disrupted | Al Jazeera, Cloudflare |
| Baltic Sea sabotage | 2024 | BCS + C-Lion1 cut, high redundancy -- near-zero impact | Wikipedia |
| Mediterranean cuts | 2008 | SEA-ME-WE 4 + FLAG cut, Egypt -70%, India -60% | Wikipedia |
| Taiwan earthquake | 2006 | 8-22 cable breaks in Luzon Strait, Asia-wide disruption | Wikipedia |
| Tonga eruption | 2022 | Tonga Cable + TDCE destroyed, 5 weeks isolated | Wikipedia |
| West Africa cuts | 2024 | WACS + MainOne + SAT-3 + ACE cut, 13 countries impacted | Cloudflare |
| East Africa cuts | 2024 | EASSy + Seacom cut off Mozambique, compounding Red Sea damage | Cloudflare |
| Egypt landing damage | 2022 | AAE-1 cut at Abu Talat + SMW-5 cut at Zafarana (two locations) | Cloudflare |
| Japan Tohoku earthquake | 2011 | 6+ cables cut, 22% trans-Pacific capacity lost | SubmarineNetworks, Lightwave |
| Vietnam cable failures | 2023 | 4 international cables degraded, -75% capacity | The Register, The Register |
React 19, TypeScript, Vite, Deck.gl 9, MapLibre GL, Zustand, Tailwind CSS 4, D3, Vitest, Biome, Puppeteer, pnpm.
CARTO Dark Matter basemap (free, no API key).
src/
components/ UI -- globe, impact panel, sidebar, mobile scenario bar, about panel
engine/ Graph, pathfinding, simulation (BFS + Dijkstra), Web Worker
data/ Types, data loader
state/ Zustand store
utils/ Geo math, color scales, path projection
scripts/ Data pipeline (fetch TeleGeography, build static JSON)
public/data/ Pre-built static datasets (committed)
e2e/ Puppeteer E2E tests (22 suites, desktop + mobile)
MIT