When Submarine Cables Go Dark: Understanding and Preparing for the Risks of Taiwan's International Internet Disconnection
Summary
The study analyzes how Taiwan's everyday web services would fare during large-scale submarine cable outages by measuring frontend resource dependencies on foreign resources and Taiwan cloud nodes. It finds that 39.3% of sites are foreign-dependent and 49.6% are cloud-dependent, with 11.2% locally-contained; the results emphasize data localization, resilient cloud architectures, and policy planning for both public and private sectors. The article provides a reproducible framework for resilience assessment and concrete recommendations for improving service availability during external connectivity disruptions.