Dual Bass Strait cable cuts cause Tasmanian outage

On 1 March 2022, Tasmania lost most of its connection to the rest of Australia after two of the three fibre-optic cables linking the island to the mainland failed within hours of each other. Tasmania is connected via three cables, two operated by Telstra and a third owned by the Tasmanian government and laid alongside the Basslink electricity interconnector. The two affected links were both Telstra cables. According to reporting, one was severed around 11am near Frankston in Victoria, where third-party civil works caused what Telstra described as massive damage, and the second was cut at a location in Tasmania near Boat Harbour, west of Devonport, around 1pm, with roadworks on the Bass Highway implicated.

The near-simultaneous loss of two of the three links cut Tasmania's connectivity to the outside world by an estimated 70 percent. Internet (including NBN and ADSL), fixed and mobile phone services, and mobile data were disrupted across the state, and some radio and television broadcasts, banking and electronic payment systems were affected. Outages began in the early afternoon, with partial restoration through the afternoon and full service reported restored by about 7pm. Telstra technicians had to haul and reconnect close to one kilometre of fibre to repair the Victorian cable.

This was an accidental, technical outage rather than sabotage or hybrid warfare. Reporting attributes the damage to separate third-party construction and roadworks incidents that coincidentally struck two of the three Bass Strait fibre links on the same day, not to any deliberate or state-directed act. The episode is notable mainly for exposing Tasmania's reliance on a small number of cable routes and the cascading effect on internet, telephony, broadcasting and payment services when redundancy is lost. There is no indication of foreign involvement, and the cause should be understood as coincidental civil-works damage.