TPKM2 - Cable Damage

On 22 January 2025, the Taiwan-Matsu No. 2 (TPKM2) domestic submarine cable, one of the lines connecting Taiwan proper to the outlying Matsu Islands, lost connectivity at around 5:30 a.m. local time, leaving the archipelago without its main fibre links. The fault came while the Taiwan-Matsu No. 3 cable was already offline, having gone down on 15 January, so both of Matsu's principal cables were out of service at the same time. Chunghwa Telecom and Taiwan's Ministry of Digital Affairs activated backup systems, including a microwave link providing up to 12.6 Gbps and satellite dishes reserved for critical infrastructure such as government, banks and hospitals.

Deputy Digital Affairs Minister Herming Chiueh said the preliminary assessment pointed to natural degradation rather than deliberate damage. He explained that as cables deteriorate, core wires snap in progression along the line, which differs from an anchor strike that would sever function all at once, and noted that winter ocean currents accelerate such wear. According to Ministry officials cited by Focus Taiwan, Coast Guard radar playback and Chunghwa Telecom monitoring showed no suspicious vessels near the damaged cables. The Matsu fault was reported as part of an unprecedented cluster of Taiwanese cable incidents in early 2025, several in January alone, which officials contrasted with a handful of faults in each of the two preceding years.

This specific TPKM2 fault was officially classed as natural deterioration, consistent with the progressive, single-core failure pattern and winter currents described by the Ministry of Digital Affairs, and with the absence of suspicious vessel activity on Coast Guard and Chunghwa Telecom monitoring. That attribution should be read as a preliminary official assessment rather than a forensic conclusion. Even so, the incident sits within an unprecedented early-2025 cluster of Taiwanese cable faults that fuelled broader gray-zone concern, and it underscored Matsu's reliance on a small number of vulnerable cables and on limited microwave and satellite backups.