Libya has six working submarine cables reaching its shores, more capacity than several wealthier countries in a new study, and it still scored a perfect 100 out of 100 on a global ranking of the countries most exposed to a digital blackout. The study, published in July 2026 by data infrastructure provider TRG Datacentres, graded nearly 100 countries with populations above one million and internet penetration above 70% on submarine cable access, internet exchange points, cybersecurity readiness and electricity reach.
The list that results doubles as a map of the world’s live blockades, frozen conflicts and postwar power sharing deals. Libya, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the West Bank and Gaza, Bolivia and Armenia fill the top five, and four of those five carry an active or recent territorial dispute at the root of their score.
A Perfect Score, Despite Six Undersea Cables
Libya’s cable count should have been a strength. Six lines connect the country to global networks, yet TRG found that traffic funnels through a single internet exchange point, the local hub where domestic networks swap data without routing overseas. If that one facility fails, the shortcut disappears and traffic has nowhere else to go.
Electricity compounds the problem. Libya’s grid reaches just 73.2% of the population, the report found, so even healthy cables and exchange points mean little if the power behind them cuts out. About 82% of Libyans use the internet, which means a nationwide outage would hit businesses, banks and public services at a scale few governments could absorb quickly.
When a country’s digital backbone goes down, its hospitals are unable to pull up patient charts, banks are frozen mid transaction, and border crossings can’t check passports. Entire supply chains run on the internet now, so one bad outage can stall deliveries, paychecks, and government services all at once.
TRG Datacentres wrote in the report.
How TRG Built the Vulnerability Score
TRG combined four inputs into one number: how many submarine cables and internet exchange points a country has, how ready its cybersecurity defenses are, and how much of the population has reliable electricity. A higher score signals greater exposure, not worse everyday internet speed. A country can browse and stream just fine and still rank near the top if it has no backup routes.
Bosnia and Herzegovina placed second at 97.2. It has no submarine cables of its own, so every byte of international traffic has to cross a neighboring country first. Its cybersecurity score, 33.6 out of 100, was among the weakest TRG recorded anywhere, even with universal electricity access.
The West Bank and Gaza came third at 92.6, also without submarine cables and reliant on just two internet exchange points despite more than 86% of residents being online. Bolivia was fourth at 90.1 and Armenia fifth at 84.4. Both are landlocked, both lack submarine cables, and both depend on only two exchange points for their entire connection to the rest of the internet.
| Rank | Country | Vulnerability Score | Key Weak Point |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Libya | 100 | Traffic funneled through one internet exchange point; electricity reaches 73.2% of the population |
| 2 | Bosnia and Herzegovina | 97.2 | No submarine cables; cybersecurity score of 33.6 out of 100 |
| 3 | West Bank and Gaza | 92.6 | No submarine cables; only two internet exchange points |
| 4 | Bolivia | 90.1 | Landlocked with no submarine cables; only two internet exchange points |
| 5 | Armenia | 84.4 | Landlocked with no submarine cables; historically routed through Georgia and Iran |
Belarus, Lebanon, Mongolia, North Macedonia and Moldova round out the top ten, according to the report, though TRG did not publish individual scores for that second group of five.
Tonga’s Five Weeks in the Dark
A score in the 80s or 90s describes something that has already happened elsewhere. In January 2022, an underwater volcanic eruption near Tonga severed the Pacific nation’s only international fiber cable in two places. Tonga went dark, cut off from the world with little more than satellite phones, according to ABC News reporting at the time.
Repairs depended on one specialized cable ship, based in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, roughly 4,000 kilometers away, the BBC reported. Tonga’s connection was not fully restored for more than five weeks, Al Jazeera reported, and it was not the country’s first blackout of this kind. A 2019 cable fault had already left Tonga without most internet service for over ten days.
That is the practical meaning of a country holding one submarine cable or one exchange point between itself and total disconnection. Libya, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the West Bank and Gaza, Bolivia and Armenia are all one bad day away from a version of Tonga’s five weeks.
A Ranking Shaped by War as Much as Wiring
Four of TRG’s top five carry a live or recent territorial dispute. Libya has been fractured since the 2011 uprising against Muammar Gaddafi split the state into competing administrations that still cannot agree on a single government. Bosnia and Herzegovina still runs on the power sharing structure drawn up by the 1995 Dayton peace accords, which never gave its telecoms sector the scale to build a cable of its own. The West Bank and Gaza route their connectivity through infrastructure controlled by neighboring states. Armenia has spent three decades locked out of two of its four land borders.
TRG’s top ten beyond those five follows a similar mold.
- Belarus – isolated by Western sanctions since its disputed 2020 election and cut off further after backing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
- Lebanon – stuck inside a currency and banking collapse that has gutted infrastructure spending since 2019
- Mongolia – landlocked between Russia and China with no coastline to land a cable of its own
- North Macedonia – a small, landlocked Balkan economy still building out regional fiber routes
- Moldova – Europe’s poorest country, still shadowed by the unresolved conflict in Transnistria
Only two names in the full top ten, Libya and Lebanon, sit on a coastline long enough to land a cable. The other eight are landlocked, or, like the West Bank and Gaza, dependent on routes controlled by someone else.
Armenia’s Thirty Year Detour Through Georgia and Iran
Armenia’s exposure traces to a specific, dated cause. Turkey sealed its border with Armenia in 1993, during the first Nagorno-Karabakh war, and has kept it closed ever since. Azerbaijan’s border has been shut even longer. For more than three decades, Armenia’s only paths outward, for people, trade and internet traffic alike, ran through Georgia to the north and Iran to the south.
That started to change only this year. On June 17, Azerbaijani operator AzerTelecom and the Armenian operator Telecom Armenia signed an agreement to carry each other’s international internet traffic directly, the first digital link between the two networks since the Soviet Union dissolved. The deal followed a peace agreement the two countries initialed in Washington in August 2025, and Azerbaijan has since eased other transit restrictions along the border.
It is a small routing change with an outsized signal. Armenia’s score reflects three decades of closed land borders as much as it reflects fiber capacity, and the fix that finally moved the needle came from a peace process, not a data center budget.
Why Can’t Landlocked Countries Just Add More Cables?
Landlocked countries have no coastline to bring a cable ashore, so they lease capacity through a neighbor’s territory instead. That leaves them dependent on whatever exchange points and transit deals that neighbor allows, with little control over price, priority or protection if a link breaks.
Bolivia lost its Pacific coastline to Chile in an 1879 to 1884 war and has been landlocked ever since. Its international data, like its trade, has to cross a border to reach salt water. Mongolia sits between two much larger neighbors, Russia and China, under the same restriction. Belarus, Moldova, North Macedonia and Armenia share the same geography.
Internet exchange points matter for a related reason. They let a country’s own networks trade data locally instead of sending it overseas and back, which is faster, cheaper, and keeps domestic traffic alive even if an international cable goes down. TRG treats a country with only one or two exchange points as exposed, because a single fire, cyberattack or power cut at that one site can take a whole country’s traffic with it.
The economics discourage quick fixes. Submarine cables now carry an estimated 99% of international data traffic, worth close to ten trillion dollars in transactions every day, European Parliament research on undersea cable security found. New capacity is not cheap either. Telecom cable construction can cost between 25,000 and 45,000 euros per kilometer, according to the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, before a country even secures the political access needed to bring a line ashore.
The Fixes TRG Wants Are Not Only Technical
TRG’s own recommendation is plain: more cables, more exchange points, sturdier electricity grids, and cybersecurity budgets that match the risk. That echoes what cable security researchers have argued for years. A Center for Strategic and International Studies analysis frames undersea cables as critical infrastructure that now needs the same protection, repair, and redundancy planning given to power grids or water systems.
Well connected economies carry the same underlying risk, just with more insulation against it. A global internet outage now ranks as the second most feared Black Swan business scenario among risk managers surveyed for Allianz’s latest Risk Barometer, and a single cloud provider’s error in October 2025 already rippled across more than a thousand companies.
Governments that deliberately restrict access show a related fragility. Iran’s own internet only came back online after 88 days, with heavier filters in place. Whether the cause is sanctions, war, a severed cable or a government’s own kill switch, the result for ordinary residents looks the same: a banking app that will not load, a hospital chart that will not open, a border post that cannot check a passport.
TRG’s data does not show a single country moving off the list this year. The clearest change so far is Armenia’s, and it came from a peace process, not a procurement budget.
