KUALA LUMPUR, April 11 — Malaysian internet users in Malaysia experienced "minimal” interruption after faults were detected on the Asia Pacific Cable Network 2 (APCN2) submarine cable, the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) said today.

The APCN2 submarine cable, which connects Malaysia to Singapore, Hong Kong and the United States, is one of 14 submarine cable systems worldwide jointly owned by Telekom Malaysia (TM).

The damaged segment 3 cable connects Chongming, China and Lantau, Hong Kong.

TM dispersed affected traffic flow through their other submarine cables in order to reduce the impact on users, the MCMC said in a statement.

"TM has also activated additional capacity through the Cahaya Malaysia submarine cable system which connects Malaysia’s international traffic to Japan,” read the statement.

"Internet users in Malaysia have only experienced minimal interruption, as there are other submarine cables available to channel Internet traffic as needed.”

TM drew brickbats from users following complaints of slow internet traffic, which registered an unprecedented increase since a shutdown was enforced on March 18.

Yesterday the government said it is extending the movement control order for another two weeks, even as new Covid-19 infections have decreased for the past three days.

A day ago, TM said it detected faults on APCN2, which is causing disruption to Malaysia’s Internet service.

The fault has been isolated to Segment 3 of the cable system, which is located between Lantau in Hong Kong and Chongming in China.

The damage to the submarine cable was first reported by lowyat.net. In the report, it said the internet connection between Malaysia and the United States had been affected by the cable faults because the country’s connection is directly linked to Lantau through Segment 2 of APCN 2 from Kuantan.

The claim was dismissed by the MCMC, who said global giants such as Akamai Technologies, Amazon.com, Facebook Inc., Google Inc, Microsoft MSN, and other international content providers have peering connections at the Malaysia Internet Exchange (MyIX), and most of them provide cache servers at local Internet service providers' networks.

"This means that their content is accessible locally by Internet users without any interruption,” its statement read.

TM has given assurance that all necessary steps will be taken to reduce the impact of service interruption to users, it added.

The commission also said it will continue to monitor the situation to ensure there is no major interruption to its internet services during the MCO period.