How deep was the water where the cables were cut?
Im not sure how deep the breaks are at but in working with BT this week on the FLAG outage they reported that the break was close to shore so we are look at a fast est. time to repair (ETR), about a month...(I’ve seen 6 month+ outages on Pac rim cables)
I worked International tel com for 15 years and undersea cable outages like this happen all the time. I have to tracked these outages and the repair.. I might be tracking two three outages in any given week.. The FLAG and SE-WE-ME 4 outages this last week, while causing problems, was not that unusual... there is restore or Alt path (redundant) bandwidth held in reserve for just this reason
And yes I’ve had undersea cable outages caused by submarines running over the cable