“It was a major disruption,” Frank Rey, director of global network strategy for Microsoft’s Cloud Infrastructure and Operations division, said in a statement. In 2012, Hurricane Sandy slammed into the US East Coast, causing an estimated $71 billion in damage and knocking out several key exchanges where undersea cables linked North America and Europe. They carry almost all our communications and yet – in a world of wireless networking and smartphones – we are barely aware that they exist.Ī map showing the first telegraph cable laid across the Atlantic between the US and UK. Underwater cables are the invisible force driving the modern internet, with many in recent years being funded by internet giants such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Amazon. Today, there are around 380 underwater cables in operation around the world, spanning a length of over 1.2 million kilometers (745,645 miles). In 2018, the Marea cable began operating between Bilbao, Spain, and the US state of Virginia, with transmission speeds of up to 160 terabits per second – 16 million times faster than the average home internet connection. 1 (TAT-1), the first underwater telephone cable, was laid, and by 1988, TAT-8 was transmitting 280 megabytes per second – about 15 times the speed of an average US household internet connection – over fiber optics, which use light to transmit data at breakneck speeds. Library of Congressīy 1866, new cables were transmitting 6 to 8 words a minute, which would rise to more than 40 words before the end of the century. The message took over 17 hours to deliver, at 2 minutes and 5 seconds per letter by Morse code, and the cable operated for less than a month due to a variety of technical failures, but a global communications revolution had begun.Ī telegram sent between Queen Victoria and US President James Buchanan over the first transatlantic undersea cable. In their inaugural cables, Queen Victoria hailed the “great international work” by the two countries, the culmination of almost two decades of effort, while Buchanan lauded a “triumph more glorious, because far more useful to mankind, than was ever won by conqueror on the field of battle. Just over two weeks later, the UK’s Queen Victoria sent a congratulatory message to then US President James Buchanan, which was followed by a parade through the streets of New York, featuring a replica of a ship which helped lay the cable and fireworks over City Hall. There, they connected two ends of a 4,000 kilometer (2,500 mile) long, 1.5 centimeter (0.6 inch) wide cable, linking for the first time the European and North American continents by telegraph. On July 29, 1858, two steam-powered battleships met in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

Internet trunk