{"id":20261,"date":"2025-09-30T04:37:28","date_gmt":"2025-09-30T02:37:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/2025\/09\/30\/extremely-offline-what-happened-when-a-pacific-island-was-cut-off-from-the-internet-samanth-subramanian\/"},"modified":"2025-09-30T04:37:28","modified_gmt":"2025-09-30T02:37:28","slug":"extremely-offline-what-happened-when-a-pacific-island-was-cut-off-from-the-internet-samanth-subramanian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/2025\/09\/30\/extremely-offline-what-happened-when-a-pacific-island-was-cut-off-from-the-internet-samanth-subramanian\/","title":{"rendered":"Extremely offline: what happened when a Pacific island was cut off from the internet | Samanth Subramanian"},"content":{"rendered":"

A colossal volcanic eruption in January 2022 ripped apart the underwater cables that connect Tonga to the world \u2013 and exposed the fragility of 21st-century life<\/p>\n

For a while, Sam Vea had been smelling sulphur on the air \u2013 only mildly infernal, like a distant sniff of hell, but sulphur nonetheless. Still, on the Saturday evening when the explosion happened, he sat up in fright. It sounded so near he thought some cataclysm had occurred right there, in his neighbourhood. The windows trembled. The curtains fell off. Vea peeked out of his house but saw nothing destroyed or on fire, so he looked at his wife and said: \u201cThis has to be the volcano.\u201d<\/p>\n

Vea and his wife live in Tofoa, which, if you squint and picture Tonga\u2019s main island of Tongatapu as a long, medieval shoe, lies just below the instep, on a gentle rise of earth. They\u2019d just returned home after dropping their daughters at a birthday party, but now Vea dashed to his van to go and collect them. On the way back, the road filled with cars hurrying away from the sea, and tiny pebbles fell from the sky. Not that long before, curious to see what a big volcanic eruption looked like, Vea had watched Dante\u2019s Peak on Netflix. In the movie, he remembered now, a white-hot rock had punched through the roof of a truck and killed Pierce Brosnan\u2019s partner, so he pulled over to wait out the traffic. The skies grew mottled with dust and ash. Drivers got out, took off their shirts and wiped their windshields down so they could see the road ahead. When they reached home, after two and a half hours, Vea sent his children to hide under the bed.<\/p>\n

Continue reading…<\/a>
\nA colossal volcanic eruption in January 2022 ripped apart the underwater cables that connect Tonga to the world \u2013 and exposed the fragility of 21st-century life
\nFor a while, Sam Vea had been smelling sulphur on the air \u2013 only mildly infernal, like a distant sniff of hell, but sulphur nonetheless. Still, on the Saturday evening when the explosion happened, he sat up in fright. It sounded so near he thought some cataclysm had occurred right there, in his neighbourhood. The windows trembled. The curtains fell off. Vea peeked out of his house but saw nothing destroyed or on fire, so he looked at his wife and said: \u201cThis has to be the volcano.\u201d
\nVea and his wife live in Tofoa, which, if you squint and picture Tonga\u2019s main island of Tongatapu as a long, medieval shoe, lies just below the instep, on a gentle rise of earth. They\u2019d just returned home after dropping their daughters at a birthday party, but now Vea dashed to his van to go and collect them. On the way back, the road filled with cars hurrying away from the sea, and tiny pebbles fell from the sky. Not that long before, curious to see what a big volcanic eruption looked like, Vea had watched Dante\u2019s Peak on Netflix. In the movie, he remembered now, a white-hot rock had punched through the roof of a truck and killed Pierce Brosnan\u2019s partner, so he pulled over to wait out the traffic. The skies grew mottled with dust and ash. Drivers got out, took off their shirts and wiped their windshields down so they could see the road ahead. When they reached home, after two and a half hours, Vea sent his children to hide under the bed. Continue reading…Technology | The Guardian<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A colossal volcanic eruption in January 2022 ripped apart the underwater cables that connect Tonga to the world \u2013 and exposed the fragility of 21st-century life For a while, Sam Vea had been smelling sulphur on the air \u2013 only mildly infernal, like a distant sniff of hell, but sulphur nonetheless. Still, on the Saturday …<\/p>\n

Extremely offline: what happened when a Pacific island was cut off from the internet | Samanth Subramanian<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":20262,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20261"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20261"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20261\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}