A submarine cable that links Australia to Southeast Asia has been cut, increasing the latency for Australian users to Asian destinations.

The cut, the third this year, occurred early on 3 December morning, a published report said. The damage was about 1126 km from the Singapore landing point.

The SEA-ME-WE3 cable was affected by a series of cuts, which are generally due to ship anchors, storms and earthquakes, including an outage in August 2017 when its insulation near Hong Kong was damaged.

The head of Vocus International, Luke Mackinnon, was quoted as saying: “These faults can be tricky to fix, and as a cable system ages, become more prominent.”

The Vocus Group is building a subsea cable known as the Australia Singapore Cable and workrecently.

The $170-million-dollar project will link Australia with Singapore and Indonesia.

The SEA-ME-WE3 cable is about 20 years old.