What's new on GeoCables

№60 Incident pages open faster

The "Who is affected" section used to noticeably delay opening an incident page. The page now opens faster.

№58 Homepage: internet outages and cable incidents

Below the list of updated dossiers there is now a block with links to internet outage pages by country and to cable incidents, so these pages are easier to reach from the homepage.

№59 Internal data checks

Internal checks that watch data collection were updated. Nothing changes for visitors.

№56 Radar: city labels no longer overlap

On the network radar, labels of nearby cities no longer overlap. When space is tight, the city with trouble or the larger one is labelled; the others show when you zoom in or hover.

№36 Internal measurement coverage map

An internal tool: a map showing which places in the world are covered by our observations and how. It does not affect visitor pages.

№37 Outage showcase

Merged into “Network radar” (No. 40).

№39 «Where it is down» page with a report button

Merged into “Network radar” (No. 40).

№40 Network radar

New page “Network radar” (/radar), first in the Live menu. One look tells you whether the network is calm or something is noisy: the world map shows the cities we watch and the channels between them, and the badge names the noisy cities. Clicking a city opens a plain-language breakdown: which operators are affected, since when, what happened over the day. Zooming in shows districts, operators and streets where residents report problems. The time slider rewinds a day, and events in the bottom line are clickable. The “Something is down for me” button takes a report with the place refined down to the street and answers with what we already know. The “Where it's down” page (/nearby) merged into the radar.

№41 Operator names in place breakdowns

Place breakdowns name operators from the network and provider registries, count operators in words and label the city summary as “city as a whole”, without stray symbols.

№43 Overland links: pages for city pairs

New section “Overland links” in the Learn menu: pairs of cities we keep measuring, with usual delay, number of hops and the current state. Each link has its own page: usual path across transit operators, recent changes, neighbouring links. The grid now includes junction cities of Europe and Asia (Warsaw, Frankfurt, Istanbul, Baku, Tashkent and more); their links appear once a baseline is collected, in a few days.

№55 Measurement points shown with cities again

The “Our measurements to the city” block and the measurement sources tables show the city of each measurement point again. Service details of our probes are visible to the administrator only.

№54 Measurement sources table: own points by number

In the “Measurement sources” table on place pages our own measurement points are now labelled by number (“Our point N”), the same as in the “Our measurements to the city” block. Third-party probes are shown as before.

№42 “Our measurements to the city” block on half of the places

Place pages now show a block with our traceroutes to the city over the last 30 days: measurement point, usual delay, number of hops. For now only a random half of the places with measurements get it, to compare whether the block helps Google index the page (experiment until 25.10). Places without measurements show no block.

№53 Back button from every list

The back button now appears wherever you came from: the cable catalogue, a country page, landing points, cable to landing point and back, research, incidents, the connection check. It is now shown on incident pages too. Arrow glyphs in back links are gone.

№52 Cable map: easier to hit a cable, no more "rectangles"

On the cable map a line now responds within a 10-pixel band, not only on the thin thread itself. The seams between basemap tiles that showed up as vertical lines and rectangles when zooming are gone: the map now zooms in whole steps. The back button on a cable page returns to the map focused on that cable.

№51 Deployments by year: the cables behind each number

Hover a bar or a count in the table to open the list of cables that went live that year, with lengths; each one links to its page. The back button on the cable page returns you to the same year.

№50 Menu: sections by question, not by data source

The Live section now answers "what is happening now": Live map, Cable monitoring, Events log, Cable incidents. Latency, deployments by year and Pulse moved to Learn: they are indexes and articles. Shutdowns left the menu (its data lives in ISP status); the page itself stays.

№48 Live map colours: "no history" and cables

On the live map, blue meant both cables with measurements (brighter = more pings today) and pings with "no history". A ping without history is now grey, and the Traffic legend explains the cable colour.

№49 Transit map: clearer, and city search in Russian

A one-line explanation above the map says what it shows and what the balloons mean. Tooltips, legend and the city panel now use plain words (network nodes, operators, bad reputation instead of IPs, ASNs, Flagged). Cities can be searched in Russian too.

№47 Share buttons on outage pages

Country outage pages, outage day pages and cable incident reports now have a share bar under the title: copy link, X, Telegram, WhatsApp, Facebook. The link goes with the page title and shows a card with a map in messengers.

№45 Link previews with a map

A link to any page of the site shared on X, Telegram, WhatsApp or Facebook now shows a card with a title, a description and an image. For country outage pages, country overviews and cables the image is a map of the country or the cable route.

№46 Facebook page setup

Internal setting for Facebook publishing. No change to the site pages.

№44 Countries: cables and status on one page

Each country page now has sections for its submarine cables (linked, with length and year of service), landing points and connectivity status. The event spotlight on the homepage links to the country page.

№41 Link to our Facebook page

The site footer and the About page now link to our Facebook page.

№42 Service improvements to publishing and collection

Facebook posts come with maps again and are more varied; the trace collector no longer polls excluded targets. No visible change on visitor pages.

№43 Posts on X

Page posts will also appear on X (Twitter), with the same maps. No visible change on visitor pages.

№40 Measurement sources wording

Clarified across the site that measurements come from our own distributed network. Cable-data attribution is kept.

№40 Live map introduction on the home page

Above the live monitoring block there is now a short explanation of what the live map is and what it shows, with a clear «Open the live map» button.

№41 «Live verification» instead of a third-party name

The feature that checks a route with real measurements is now called «Live verification» on the home page: the calculator button, the feature card and the steps refer to our own measurement network. The «Cable of the day» description no longer breaks off mid-word.

№42 Data collection housekeeping

Internal data collectors identify themselves honestly to sources and no longer fail when a source is temporarily unavailable. It does not affect visitor pages.

№35 Live map without emoji

On the live map emoji were replaced with the site's icons: layer hints, the help window, the conflict-zone and chronology panels, event and vessel pop-ups. This is the last big step: emoji are gone from every page of the site; country flags stay.

№34 Monitoring without emoji

On the cable monitoring page emoji were replaced with the site's icons: tabs, the list of checks, regions, event history, cable states, search. The History tab is also readable in the light theme now.

№33 Home page without emoji

On the home page, in the calculator and all its windows, emoji were replaced with the site's icons: result tabs, the route table, the route window, measurement progress, the “Did you know” block. The icons take the theme colour and are visible in both light and dark.

№32 Emoji replaced with icons on twenty pages

The second step of replacing emoji directly on the pages: cable, landing point, pulse, ISP status, shutdowns, transit map, country map, conflict zones, event log, author, research, widgets and others. The site's own icons, in the text colour, stand in their place. The card embedded on other sites is free of emoji too.

№31 Latency index map: readable label and correct outlines

On the map under the network latency index the zone label is now readable in the light theme, land is coloured to match the theme, and continents and cables no longer stretch in stripes across the frame. The Transatlantic zone shows the Atlantic instead of the whole world.

№29 Header and sign-in windows without emoji

In the site header and the sign-in windows emoji were replaced with drawn icons or removed: the theme switch now shows a drawn sun and moon. This is the first step of replacing emoji directly on the pages.

№30 Header buttons share one look

The buttons on the right of the header (languages, help, theme, account, phone menu) now share one look: one height, no borders, one corner radius. The chosen language is marked by colour instead of a separate filled chip.

№28 “Calculator” links lead to the calculator itself

Calculator links in the guide and in the footer now open the home page right at the calculator instead of at the top.

№27 Automatic emoji replacement switched off; the route window and measurement progress are readable in the light theme

The automatic replacement of emoji with icons was switched off: in the route window on the home page the icons became invisible. Emoji will be replaced directly on the pages, step by step. The route window now follows the chosen theme, and the measurement progress log and the “Did you know” block are readable in the light theme.

№26 Drawn icons instead of emoji across the site

The stray colourful emoji on the pages were replaced by icons in the site's own style: one line weight, theme colours. The coloured status circles became neat dots. Country flags stay.

№25 User guide: checked, extended and linked to the pages

The guide was rebuilt in the common look of the site: sections became stations, steps became nodes, and the icons are drawn instead of random emoji. Four sections were added: events and shutdowns, maps, data and widgets, finding your way. Outdated numbers were corrected. Each section now links to the pages it describes, and the pages themselves got a link back, “How to use this page”, in the “you are here” line and in the help menu: it leads straight to the right place in the guide.

№20 Pages share one vertical line

Moving between pages used to make the content jump left and right, and the main heading was sometimes tiny and sometimes huge. Regular pages now share one left edge, one distance from the header and two heading styles: a plain one for data pages and a serif one for cables, landing points and articles. Heading texts did not change. All maps now sit the same way: across the full window with small equal margins, the transit map included. On the transit map the chosen city is now obvious: its name stays in the search field and the city is ringed and labelled on the map. In the city search the list of matches no longer hides under the buttons: the city name and country are visible, and if the city is not on the map the page says so. The Contact page was rebuilt: a form with labelled fields on the left, topics on the right; it and the Privacy page no longer show dark blocks in the light theme. The author page is now readable in the light theme, status colours in the light theme are darker and easier to read, and the corners of the new elements are rounded like the rest of the site. The widgets page was tidied up and is now available in Russian, French and Spanish.

№21 The menu and the "where am I" line now agree

The line under the header named pages that were missing from the menu, such as "Cable incidents" or "About". Every page named in the line now has a menu item under the same name, highlighted when you are on that page. Clicking the section name in the line opens its menu. The shutdowns page no longer shows English explanations in the Russian, French and Spanish versions.

№22 Incidents, shutdowns, About and Methodology come alive

The cable incidents page is no longer a bare list: significant incidents are grouped by world region as a route, each with a small chart of the delay around the event and links to the report and the cable page. The shutdowns page shows each country as a station and each shutdown as a node, with a 30-day picture of when it went offline by hour and links to the event page and the live map replay. The About and Methodology pages now carry "The path of one measurement": six stations from a trace to the assessment of an alert, with today's figures and a link to where you can watch it live.

№23 A "back to top" button on long pages

On long pages a small arrow button now appears at the bottom right and takes you back to the top. It shows only when you have scrolled far down and disappears near the top.

№24 The search field no longer offers passwords

On pages with a search field the browser mistook it for a login field and offered to fill in a saved password. The sign-in and registration windows are now marked up so the browser does not confuse them with the search field.

№17 One look for the site's maps

The maps on cable and landing point pages, the cable map, the transit map, cable monitoring and the live map now share one basemap: topographic in the light theme and satellite in the dark one. There used to be five different basemaps, and most maps did not follow the site theme. Zoom buttons and map frames are now the same everywhere too.

№19 A "where am I" line on every page

Under the site header there is now a single line showing where you are: section, page, object. Each node in the line takes you one step back. Before, some pages had breadcrumbs, some had a "back" arrow, and most had nothing.

№18 Scheduled shutdowns are called scheduled

When a country is taken offline on a schedule, at the same hour many days in a row (this is usually done for the duration of national exams), the site now says so directly: "scheduled shutdown", with a note on how many times it has happened in two months. Previously such an event appeared on the home page, in the feed and on the event page as a "major outage". We still show every such shutdown, but we no longer present it as a failure.

№16 Cable event pages in French and Spanish

In the French and Spanish versions of the site, a cable event page showed its headline in the right language but all labels, the route analysis and the event assessment in English. The page is now fully translated.

№15 A more accurate label for alerts judged to be false

On the event page, alerts assessed as a probable false positive now say what actually happened: other measurements did not confirm the event. The previous phrase, "only one probe saw it", did not fit every case.

№14 Traces from every measurement point get city and provider right away

Some traces arrived without the cities and providers of intermediate nodes and were completed later and only partly. These details are now filled in as soon as a trace is received.

№12 Cable alert assessment: more accurate and based on the moment of the event

Every cable alert carries an assessment: a widespread event, a route change, or a probable false positive. It now relies on measurements taken at the time of the event rather than later, and uses the same comparison of two path measurements as the alerts themselves. The assessments that were missing for alerts from August and September have been filled in.

№13 Route nodes no longer lose their country and city

Some intermediate nodes on the route and transit maps were losing their country, city and provider even though these had been known before. The cause is fixed, and about 900 such nodes have been restored.

№11 Cable alerts now close by the same rule they open by

When we decide whether a cable alert is over, both of our measurements of the path are now taken into account, the same way as when the alert opens. Before, a single spike in one measurement could delay closing an alert even though the cable was already working as usual.

№10 Cable alerts are more accurate

A cable now counts as slowed down only when both of our measurements of the path show a higher delay. A single spike in one measurement while the other is normal no longer produces a flag or an alert. The usual delay we compare against is more accurate too: such spikes no longer inflate it, so real slowdowns stand out better.

№6 Country page: a scene of the latest outage and clearer labels

The internet status page of a country now plays a scene of the latest outage next to the summary, when the outage is going on or happened in the last seven days: where it is, how the signal dropped and recovered, who was affected. Labels now use the same words as the event page: the kind of outage takes the share of affected users into account, providers go by their familiar names, and "signal dip" is replaced by the share of the country's address blocks that stopped answering.

№7 Search fields no longer fill themselves

A browser could put a saved email address into the search field on the cable monitoring page (mobile view) and on the transit map. These fields, like the other search fields on the site, are now filled only by you.

№8 Cable monitoring: page fits the window and the map follows the theme

The cable monitoring page no longer shows an empty band under the map, and the map now switches together with the light or dark theme, without reloading the page.

№9 Live map: a clear return to the previous view

The live map no longer opens on a zoom you left long ago. Your previous view comes back only if you were on the map within the last half hour, and then a hint with a "Show the whole world" button appears at the top. Otherwise the map opens on the whole world. The reset button is now called "Whole world · reset".

№5 Home page: the country outage card only for fresh major outages

The outage card at the top of the home page is now shown only while a major outage is going on and for six hours after it ends. Outages that affected a small part of a country's networks no longer take the top of the page. All events remain in the "last 24 hours" block and in the events feed.

№1 Site versions and the "What's new" page

The site now has a version number, shown at the bottom of every page. Changes are published as numbered releases, and the "What's new" page records what changed in each one.

№2 Maintenance of the internal part of the site

This change affects only the internal part of the site; nothing changes for visitors.

№3 Events feed: a route schematic, filters and major events highlighted

The events feed is easier to read and has a look of its own: it is drawn as a route through time. Each day is a station and each event a node on the line. The shape of a node shows the kind of event (country, cable, land route), its fill shows how serious it was. Several events at one place within a day branch off a single node. You can filter the feed by kind of event, keep only major events, or find a country or a cable by name. The page explains what counts as a major, medium or minor event.

№4 Live map: a clearer description of the "Event impact" layer

The live map layer that joins earthquakes, storms and other natural events to nearby cables now explains itself in plain words: how many events and cables were checked, how many times a cable got slower after an event, and what each line colour means.