At a glance
Vocus lost its Australia Singapore Cable on Friday 4 September 2026 to a break in Indonesian waters between Anyer and Singapore.
INDIGO West, the other Perth to Singapore system, has been hard down since 8 August with a fault about 48km off Perth.
Perth data centres are sold on proximity to Asia, and both cables that deliver it are out at the same time.
Tech Business News measured one provider's Melbourne to Singapore path at 258ms to 350ms on 6 September, running via San Jose and Tokyo.
The repair ship's window closes on 11 September, a date the INDIGO consortium has already moved twice.
Vocus's Australia Singapore Cable, one of two direct systems between Perth and Singapore, broke on Friday 4 September in Indonesian waters. Vocus told customers that evening that "wavelength and Ethernet services are unavailable, and internet traffic has been rerouted via other paths". The cable runs 4,600km by way of Christmas Island and Anyer.
The other one has been out since 8 August. Both of Perth's direct paths to Singapore are down at the same time, and the traffic they carry is crossing the Pacific instead.
Vocus took Christmas Island offline to pinpoint the break
Over the weekend Vocus narrowed the location to Indonesian waters between Anyer, about 80km west of Jakarta, and Singapore. It then sent a test pulse down the fibre from its Perth landing station in the early hours of Sunday 6 September to measure the exact distance to the break, scheduling a six-hour window in which it said Christmas Island's services would be unavailable. By Sunday morning it had, in its words, "an accurate measurement of the cable break location".
Vocus's most recent status update, on Sunday evening, describes assembling a repair: "reviewing the latest diagnostic results, confirming the required spare materials, and coordinating the necessary permits and regulatory approvals". It has left the estimated restoration field on the incident empty. Ry Crozier reported the break for iTnews early on Monday, and Vocus has published a dated update every day since Friday, with a further one due today.
INDIGO West has been hard down since 8 August
On the evening of 8 August INDIGO West developed a shunt fault, where damage to the insulation lets seawater reach the copper conductor that powers the amplifiers spaced along the route. The status log kept by Aus Internet, an Australian ISP carried on the cable, recorded at 9.26pm that "Indigo has advised that the system is hard down due to a Shunt fault". It remains an open incident this morning. INDIGO West covers the same city pair as the Vocus cable, for a consortium that includes Google, Telstra and Singtel.
A second fault hit INDIGO Central, which carries Perth to Sydney traffic, over the same weekend. Bevan Slattery, whose company SUBCO holds capacity on both, wrote in a LinkedIn post reported by the ABC that the two cables had faulted "straight after each other and in close proximity to each other" inside the protection zone that runs 60 nautical miles off City Beach in Perth. The Australian Federal Police told iTnews on 11 August that it "has received a report of crime in relation to this matter" and was assessing it. Cable operators usually attribute shunt faults to ships' anchors and trawl gear. Neither Vocus, the consortium nor the AFP has named a cause here, and Slattery has said the cables carry no sensing equipment that would have recorded the event, so the physical cause will be known when the ship recovers the damaged sections.
Aus Internet's log has moved the ship's arrival three times. On 10 August the fault sat 65km from the Perth landing station with a vessel expected on 26 August. On 16 August the distance was refined to about 48km and the vessel moved to 30 August. On 25 August the log recorded that "the repair ship will be repairing the Shunt Fault off Perth between the 2nd and 11th of September". That 25 August entry stands as the most recent.
System and route | Fault | Where it stands, 7 September 2026 |
|---|---|---|
Australia Singapore Cable (Vocus), Perth to Singapore | Break in Indonesian waters between Anyer and Singapore | Open since 4 September. Location confirmed, repair being assembled, no restoration date given |
INDIGO West (consortium), Perth to Singapore | Shunt fault about 48km off Perth | Open since 8 August. Ship booked 2 to 11 September. Singapore-end works pushed to 2 October |
INDIGO Central (consortium), Perth to Sydney | Shunt fault off Perth | Open. Repair booked 10 to 18 September, traffic moving to terrestrial routes |
Source: Incident INC32585230 and the Aus Internet network status log, read 7 September 2026.
Perth's Singapore traffic is going east through San Jose and Tokyo
Retail customers saw no outage, because the affected traffic re-advertised onto east coast paths. Tech Business News tested one Australian provider's path on 6 September and watched Melbourne to Singapore packets travel through Sydney, San Jose, Tokyo and Hong Kong, recording "sustained round-trip latency between 258ms and 350ms, with peaks above 400ms". Tech Business News measured Melbourne, not Perth, on a single provider's network, and no operator has published a Perth figure.
SMAP, SUBCO's domestic cable in service since June with more than 400Tbps between the four mainland capitals, absorbs the west coast traffic now crossing the continent. The trans-Pacific systems carrying the onward leg also carry Australian traffic to United States cloud regions, so the reroute competes with demand that was already there. From 10 September the consortium lifts INDIGO Central for its own repair, pushing Perth to Sydney traffic onto terrestrial fibre while the Vocus break is still open.
SUBCO markets Perth to Singapore at 47ms
SUBCO publishes a Perth to Singapore round trip of about 47ms on INDIGO West. Writing for Data Center Dynamics in 2023, GreenSquareDC's Walt Coulston put the average Singapore to Perth latency at "50ms, half of that between Sydney and Singapore". Property adviser CBRE named Perth a growth market on power availability, cable connectivity and Asia proximity in its 2026 Asia Pacific outlook, which we covered in May, and the Singapore investors who bid for control of Perth's Pier DC in June were buying a position on the same corridor. Pier DC sits among the Western Australian entries in our directory of Australian data centres.
That 47ms exists while a direct cable is lit. Perth traffic is now on the eastbound path, and the only published measurement of that path, from Melbourne, runs between 258ms and 350ms. A training run inside an AI data centre absorbs it, because the traffic never leaves the campus. A production inference endpoint pays it on every request, and an agent chaining five calls pays it five times.
A Perth colocation contract commits the operator to space, power and cooling. The tenant buys the Singapore leg separately from a carrier, and since 8 August that leg has run on one cable, and since 4 September on none. A tenant renewing in Perth this week can ask the colocation provider and the carrier, in writing, which contract absorbs the reroute and at what rate. No Perth operator has commented publicly on the outage.
APX East is due in the fourth quarter of 2028
APX East, SUBCO's express route from Sydney to California, took Firmus as its cornerstone customer on 3 September for service in the fourth quarter of 2028. Google's Bosun will run from Darwin to Christmas Island with onward connectivity to Singapore, adding a second northern path alongside Vocus's Darwin Jakarta Singapore Cable, which has served Darwin since 2019.
Every repair on an Australian cable waits on a vessel chartered from overseas, a dependency we raised in our reading of Australia's 15 subsea cables and three protection zones. The INDIGO consortium has moved its vessel date twice since 10 August.
What to watch
Whether the ship reached the INDIGO West fault. The window runs to 11 September and nobody has published an update since 25 August. A fourth date would put the repair past a month.
Vocus's first restoration estimate. The incident record carries an empty field and an update was due at 11am AEST today. An estimate beyond four weeks points at Indonesian permitting rather than vessel availability.
INDIGO Central from 10 September. Perth to Sydney traffic moves to terrestrial fibre for eight days while the Singapore break is still open, which tests the same east coast path now carrying the Asia detour.
The Singapore-end works on 2 October. INDIGO West's second repair was pushed from late July and carries an outage of up to three days on the same system.