|My ISP, Netvigator, had their underwater network cables broken by a ship.| This resulted in a |poor connection to Taiwan and Japan| for all Netvigator clients. Since my server is located in Hong Kong and is using the same ISP, it is affected as well. |People browsing my websites from Taiwan and Japan may have a slower loading time|, but Cloudflare will probably cache it locally so it may not be that big of a deal.
In case you are not familiar, I stream Splatoon 3 every day. And what's the biggest complaints I had playing this game? |Lag.| I play a specific weapon class called "Brellas", and in short, let's say they require a low latency environment to work correctly.
At the start of this week, I noticed my games have been weirdly laggier than usual. It happens from time to time, so I didn't really care about that. I thought it was just bad luck. It did make my games a little bit more frustrating though.
The days go by... Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday... It did not get any better. If anything, the lag got worse. At this point, I was suspicious that something's off about the network I'm using. So on Friday, I decided to try to debug the situation.
I probed a few devices in my network to try to catch if anything is eating up the bandwidth. I ran `nethogs` on both my computer and server. The biggest consumer was my [Brella Counter](https://brella.northwestw.in), and it's only taking up like 2MB/s every 30 seconds. And my computer simply doesn't have any suspicious high bandwidth connections.
I then checked my routers bandwidth monitor. No device is taking up the bandwidth. Occasionally the download of my server and some devices spike because of the Brella Counter and my sister watching YouTube.
I ran speed tests from OFCA (Hong Kong government department) and Ookla on multiple devices. All the speed seems to be just fine, which means intra-Hongkong connections are doing just fine. This is getting very weird.
Then I noticed that [Pixiv](https://pixiv.net) is also loading quite slow. My mind instantly connected my Nintendo Switch and Pixiv together - |They are both Japanese servers.| At this point, I was starting to suspect if the ISP's connection to Japan is broken or something.
Like usual, I streamed on Saturday morning. Splatoon games were |REALLY LAGGY|. I played 8 matches and disconnected in half of them. As a last ditch effort, I restarted my room's router during stream. It did not help.
Things were kind of hopeless at this point. I ended stream early and went for breakfast. I was talking to my uncle, who also does a lot of computer stuff, about the situation, when suddenly, my dad messaged me, "Did the home network feel slower?"
Apparently, his colleague told him that |3 of Netvigator's underwater network cables broke, and the connections to Taiwan and Japan are interrupted.| The cables were broken on 6th July and 11th July, which |lined up EXACTLY with when I started to feel the lag.|
His colleague also said it's very prominent if you are gaming.
Yeah, no shit Sherlock.
Anyway, that means it's not my problem, which also unfortunately means there's nothing I can do to fix it.