The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet afloat

thank you cable maintainers!

what a wonderful story about the challenging industry and careers that are necessary to keep communication unbroken.

it was fun to read about cable patching as both one of simple mechanics (hooks and pulleys) but also of enormous challenges, including the scale of weight, depth and invisibility of these cables.

The internet is carried around the world by hundreds of thousands of miles of slender cables that sit at the bottom of the ocean. These fragile wires are constantly breaking a precarious system on which everything from banks to governments to TikTok depends. But thanks to a secretive global network of ships on standby, every broken cable is quickly fixed. This is the story of the people who repair the world's most important infrastructure.