AZDIGI’s recommendations when submarine cable incidents occur

Due to the increasing frequency of submarine cable incidents in Vietnam, this will slow down connections from Vietnam to international destinations due to insufficient bandwidth. In reality, for current website users, although submarine cable incidents may affect access to international websites, they can also affect your website if it is not properly optimized.

Submarine cable incidents affecting international routes, but Vietnamese websites are still slow. Why?

When a submarine cable incident occurs, all connections to foreign countries will be slow. And if your website is hosted with AZDIGI or other providers in Vietnam and still experiences slowness, there may be reasons such as:

Websites use proxies such as CloudFlare, Incapsula, StackPath, Sucuri, Quic.Cloud.

When using proxy services for websites, all website connections will access the proxy server instead of directly from the host. However, the proxy server nodes of these services are currently not available in Vietnam, which means your website is located overseas.

Therefore, if you are using CloudFlare services, it is recommended to disable the proxy feature and only use DNS, which will allow direct connections to the website.

After disabling the proxy in CloudFlare, you may need to reinstall the free SSL certificate on your hosting to regain access if your website uses SSL.

Websites have many links to foreign countries

On each website, there may be multiple scripts embedded from familiar services such as Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, Google Ads, Tawk.to, Zendesk, Livechat, etc., and all these services are located overseas. When embedding these scripts, users’ devices have to send connections to them, which can disrupt page loading time as these links may take longer to load than usual.

Therefore, if you must include these scripts on your website, it is recommended to use the Google Tag Manager tool to consolidate all the embedded scripts into Google Tag, and then enable asynchronous loading to allow the browser to load the entire page without waiting for these scripts to complete loading.

Websites with features that connect to foreign servers

Some other websites with specific functionalities that require sending queries to foreign countries will also be affected. For example, websites that display exchange rates and continuously retrieve data from foreign sources may experience slow loading and errors.

The above are some recommendations from AZDIGI that you need to follow if your website shows signs of unusual slow access during submarine cable incidents.