FCC adopts order requiring submarine cable outage reporting

Fri Jun 24 17:23:44 UTC 2016

In the past, over 75% of submarine cable operators did not voluntarily 
report outages of submarine cables with US landing points to the FCC.  In 
other words, less than 25% of submarine cable operators reported outages. 
The FCC would learn about the submarine cable failures, sometimes days 
later, from news reports or calls from the public.

Since the FCC treats outage reports as confidential information, that 
still means the public will not necessarily be informed.

https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-adopts-rules-reliable-submarine-cable-infrastructure

The rules require submarine cable licensees to report major outages to the 
agency’s Network Outage Reporting System (NORS). Other communications 
providers – including wireline, wireless, and satellite – already report 
outages to NORS.