This prompted an Australian Federal Police assessment and arriving days before a government-funded paper argued Australia should position itself as the region’s safest place to land a cable.
What happened
Indigo West and Indigo Central, the two systems affected, serve different routes: Indigo West connects Perth to Indonesia and Singapore, while Indigo Central links Perth to Sydney, Victoria and Tasmania.
Both developed shunt faults, where a breach in a cable’s outer insulation allows seawater to reach the internal power conductor, shorting the circuit that powers the optical repeaters along its length. The faults occurred inside the Perth Submarine Cable Protection Zone, a corridor extending roughly 100-112km offshore where anchoring and seabed-contact activities are restricted.
SUBCO founder and co-chief executive Bevan Slattery raised the issue publicly, describing the faults as occurring “straight after each other and in close proximity to each other.” He flagged what he called suspicious or coincidental vessel activity near the location and timing of the faults, but was careful not to assign cause: “This could be a coincidence or an external aggression event,” he said, adding that root cause won’t be confirmed until the cable is physically recovered, since neither Indigo system has FibreSense monitoring installed.
The Australian Federal Police confirmed on 11 August that it had received a report of crime and was assessing the information provided. It has not characterised the incident as sabotage, named a vessel, or confirmed a cause. Repairs are being planned through Indigo’s marine maintenance operator, with an estimated completion date of 26 August, subject to clearance, logistics and weather.
Why attribution remains genuinely uncertain
The instinct to read deliberate action into two near-simultaneous faults inside a protected zone is understandable, but the base rate cuts against it. The International Cable Protection Committee estimates that roughly 70-80% of global cable faults are caused by fishing gear and ship anchors, ordinary accidents rather than sabotage.
This same Perth protection zone has direct precedent for exactly that outcome: in 2021, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau found a vessel had damaged cables here after dragging its anchor, and the AFP later charged that ship’s master.
Independent vessel-tracking analysis has added a layer of scrutiny without resolving the question. Maritime intelligence firm Windward ran a multi-sensor review combining AIS behavioural history, electro-optical imagery and synthetic aperture radar, and found a vessel whose movements aligned with the timing and location of the damage. No vessel has been named publicly, and alignment in time and space does not establish cause.
Why the timing matters more than the incident itself
The faults landed just days before the ANU National Security College published a government-funded paper making the case that Australia should market itself as the Indo-Pacific’s preferred, safest cable-landing hub. The paper, produced under a Department of Defence strategic policy grant, argues that Australia’s political stability, legal protections and distance from contested maritime chokepoints position it to capture landing stations, repair infrastructure and route diversity that hyperscalers are increasingly seeking as they route around less stable waters.
That argument aligns with the 2024 New York Joint Statement, a commitment endorsed by the US, Australia, the EU and the UK to favour low-risk cable providers and coordinate repair and maintenance practices. The Perth incident functions, whether by coincidence or not, as an unplanned early test of whether that framework holds up in practice: a live investigation, a firm repair timeline, and a protection zone whose enforcement is now under fresh scrutiny, all playing out just as the policy case for Australia’s hub ambitions was published.
Google, Meta and other hyperscalers are already redrawing Indo-Pacific cable routes to avoid geopolitical chokepoints, part of the broader shift toward hyperscaler-led cable investment reshaping the region’s connectivity logic.
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