I managed to get talking to a supervisor (the agent I initially got was hopeless), and he confirmed the submarine cable issue is the cause. He forwarded me some details - relevant parts below. I also spoke to their billing department who promised some kind of compensation, but only when the issue is fixed (mid October!).
- This will not cause complete loss of service to any customers.
- This should not cause issues with accessing sites/servers within Australia
- This may cause slower loading of pages/sites hosted overseas, particularly in Asia
- This may cause higher latency/ping for sites/servers hosted overseas, particularly in Asia but also possibly in US or elsewhere due to increased traffic on other links (as traffic is re-routed from the damaged link)
- This will likely drive some calls in from people using gaming servers overseas, whether on PC, XBOX, PlayStation or other.
Engineering and Network team will try to minimise the impact as much as possible through re-routing via alternate links, however this will never be as good as the most direct "path" and so impacts as outlined are inevitable.
This will NOT cause loss of service, and should not prevent any websites from loading, it will only cause slower page loading or download/access speeds and even then mostly only to sites and servers in Asia (the break is on the link between Perth, Australia and Jakarta, Indonesia).
The first opportunity for repair will be Mid-October, and could be further delayed as noted above (weather eg storms, heavy seas etc)
As noted above, we expect gamers will probably be among those to notice any impacts the most. Unfortunately this is the reality of the situation for Australia since we have no land-based connections to the rest of the World. We are an Island. So when an undersea link goes "down", repairs are expensive and time-consuming
