The Asia-Pacific Gateway (APG), Vietnam’s lifeline undersea cable, broke down at 6:30 am on Tuesday at a spot 125 kilometers away from Hong Kong.

The rupture has disrupted Internet connections from Vietnam to other countries, according to the Vietnam Posts and Communications Group (VNPT), a major Internet service provider in the Southeast Asian nation.

The group said Internet services linked to overseas servers like Gmail, YouTube and Facebook would be affected to a certain extent.

However, according to a number of Internet service providers, they have stored fallbacks for the cable failure, for they have been familiar with the situation.

A representative from VNPT said to partly deal with the problem, it has rerouted international Internet traffic to other cable systems, which are safe and sound, and has been cooperating with its foreign partners to facilitate the Internet traffic volume related to servers outside the country.

It has employed solutions which guarantee Internet service quality, ready to provide customers with information about the cable issue and give them prompt assistance.

The time frame for restoring the cable has not been determined, according to an Internet service provider.

Three of the important international cable systems crossing Vietnam are the Intra Asia (IA), the Asia-America Gateway (AAG), and the currently failing Asia-Pacific Gateway (APG).

The last system, around 10,400 kilometers long, connects eight countries and territories in the Asia-Pacific, namely Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Taiwan, mainland China, Japan, and South Korea.

It can deliver a capacity of up to 54Tbps, the greatest of all networks in Asia, and is expected to supplant the AAG, which has suffered repeated problems over the past several years.

The rupture of the APG follows the latest incident occurring to the AAG in early January.

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