Sucuri identified the disruption at 15:00 UTC on September 22, saying multiple simultaneous subsea cable outages were reducing backbone capacity available to its upstream network provider. Traffic was being rerouted over remaining paths, creating intermittent packet loss, slower responses and possible connectivity degradation for customers whose connections traverse affected routes.
The company’s status dashboard classified its Website Firewall service as experiencing degraded performance, with Asia East and Australia specifically affected. Sucuri’s management console, dashboards, DNS infrastructure, application programming interfaces, monitoring platform, remediation platform and backup services remained listed as operational when the incident notice was issued.
Sucuri said its upstream provider was aware of the problem and was working to restore lost network capacity. It cautioned that any restoration estimates supplied by the provider should be regarded as tentative because repair and investigation schedules can change as engineers establish the nature and location of faults.
The company did not identify the precise segment of the C2C system involved, disclose the cause of the outage or provide a firm restoration time. It also did not name the other cable systems affected by the concurrent outages cited in its notice.
Sucuri did not publish a region-wide packet-loss percentage, affected customer count or traffic-volume estimate, leaving the scale of the disruption beyond its own network unclear on Tuesday.
The disruption adds pressure to a region where international data routes are heavily dependent on subsea fibre systems and where failures can push traffic onto longer or more congested alternative paths. Packet loss occurs when data packets fail to reach their destination, while rerouting can increase the distance traffic travels and raise latency even when connectivity remains available.
Independent network measurements on Tuesday also showed unusual conditions on some Asian routes, although those observations did not establish that the C2C fault was responsible. Cable monitoring data recorded a sharp hop-level latency anomaly on the wider EAC-C2C network earlier in the day, while separate measurements flagged elevated transit delays between Malaysia and Singapore and between Japan and Taiwan. Those measurements were described as telemetry signals rather than confirmation of physical cable damage.
The C2C system is a long-established intra-Asia submarine network connecting major telecommunications hubs. The original City-to-City network entered service in 2001 and 2002 and was later combined with the East Asia Crossing network. Current infrastructure databases describe the broader EAC-C2C system as extending about 36,500 kilometres, with landing points across Japan, South Korea, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Philippines and Singapore.
Telstra now owns the EAC-C2C network after acquiring Pacnet, which had previously brought the EAC and C2C assets together. Telstra describes C2C as part of its subsea network serving major Asian business centres and providing international capacity across the region.
The effect on end users can vary widely because internet providers use different carriers, peering arrangements and backup routes. A cable outage therefore does not necessarily produce a complete loss of service. Users may instead encounter slow page loading, failed requests, unstable sessions or intermittent access, depending on how traffic is redirected and how much spare capacity is available on alternative links.
For security and content-delivery platforms, degraded international transport can be particularly visible because requests may cross several networks before reaching an inspection or filtering point. Sucuri’s Website Firewall sits between protected websites and their visitors, screening traffic and helping mitigate malicious requests and distributed denial-of-service attacks. Disruption upstream of those facilities can affect performance even when Sucuri’s own application systems remain operational.
The status notice distinguished the cable-related degradation from an internal platform failure. Sucuri said the problem was affecting connectivity through its upstream provider’s backbone rather than reporting an outage of its dashboards, DNS or security APIs.
Follow Arabian Post
Select Arabian Post as your preferred source on Google and MSN News for trusted business news and Arab politics and updates.
