Say Goodbye to the Undersea Cable That Made the Global Internet Possible
2026-02-25T10:55:00ZJane Ruffino’s reported feature for Wired opens with what is, so far, my favorite piece of magazine art this year. (Nice one, Rob Vargas.) From there, you’re quickly aboard the Maasvliet, the diesel electric ship whose crew is tasked with hauling up thousands of kilometers of TAT-8—the first fiber-optic cable to span the seabed of the Atlantic Ocean, a feat that Ruffino describes as “practically tantamount to human galactic expansion.” An absolute showcase of explanatory writing, Ruffino’s story goes deep on the history and afterlife of the cables that enable digital communication, and grants the many people who manage such infrastructure some welcome visibility.
Fiber-optic transmission is a near-magical way of carrying information by pulses of light. Most people don’t even think about how quickly we’ve accepted instantaneous communication as normal, even those of us who can remember when an international phone call had to be booked in advance. The more people I meet in this industry, in this network of networks of people and things, the more insulting it sounds to hear that “we” only notice it when it breaks. (Who is this “we,” I always want to know?) Billions of people are able to walk around not noticing this infrastructure because of the daily work of a few thousand people, sometimes at sea, other times buried under piles of permits, surveys, and purchase orders for thousands of kilometers of cables that will join the millions of kilometers of cables on the seabed that ensure that our planet is continuously being hugged by light.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2026/02/25/tat-8-fiber-optic-cable-sharks/
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