© NEIL SANDS, AFP/File
Tonga, which lies nearly 3,300 kilometres (2,000 miles) east of Australia, was plunged into digital darkness for a fortnight.
The sudden internet outage on January 20 brought an abrupt halt to many businesses and cut access to social media -- the community's lifeline to the outside world.
"We had to learn how to talk to each other without internet messaging," Joshua Savieti, who works in the creative arts, said of the involuntary digital detox.
"We didn't know anything, what was going on, anything on the news, (or) if there was a cyclone coming."
It took 13 days to find the fault -- a severed undersea cable -- and reconnect Tonga, which lies nearly 2,400 kilometres (1,500 miles) northeast of New Zealand.
During the blackout, a small, locally operated satellite service helped maintain limited service, but the speed was a throwback to dial-up days.
To conserve capacity officials filtered out social media, cutting families off from relatives and friends overseas and dealing a blow to companies which operate through Facebook.
Comment: As Jordan Peterson said, "Patreon has learned nothing". Adding a bunch of features no one cares about is not going to solve their problem of multiple people exiting the platform due to their biased ousting of people with political viewpoints they don't agree with. Why set up your business around a platform you could be kicked off if you say something the morality police deem unacceptable?
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