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by WillyWonkaJr 506 days ago
Undersea cables carry trillions of dollars in transactions daily. Their value cannot be overstated.
3 comments

The ones under the Baltic (with the exception of some islands) are not 'critical', as in they're used for reasons (cost, latency, directness), but those reasons are not b/c there's no other way to connect to the Internet.

So, annoyance at most.

But cutting a few of them doesn’t mean the transactions don’t happen, they’re just slightly delayed, so you can’t count the full value of those transactions as a loss.

To adapt the old saying, the internet interprets cut cables as unreachable intermediate nodes and routes around them.

Uh... not between Sweden and Latvia they don't. That's like saying "Mosquito's kill millions from Malaria!" while you run around trying to swat one.

Sure, in aggregate lots of technologies are critically important to modern society. But you don't cry when a single rail car gets damaged.