I have worked at THREE Gateway stations,
and I would like to see someone "attack" the beachhead under all that concrete and stone plus the expansion tension vault. Its down underground fairly deep. The guys outside one of the TAT-like stations in Nova Scotia are aware of Beach side activity and there are surveilance cams pointed *everywhere*. The Beach-head is also a nice Lunch break place to eat the sandwich and watch gulls compete for crumbs.

Yes, we are vunerable and
Yes, the Gateways and International Carriers are a single point of failure contact,
but stuff like this does NOT happen often,
hysteria and media coverage aside.

Don not worry; there are (some) alternatives. There are reciprocal arrangements. There is some redundancy. Fool me ONCE rule here; the (legitimate long haul) Carriers are fairly quick to implement redundancy after a "learning experience" because of the vast revenue losses due to outage.

I started at a time when T4 and T5 Transmission were the typical HighTech TransOceanic crossing, but the new Fiber and sheaths/outer skin technology is really amazing, far beyond anything back in the 1970's.

I bet a cable ship is already dragging the pickup hook (yup, I know this takes Time+Money), or the alternate plan is kicking in. I recall a small Canadian Carrier went BIGTIME during a LOS-outage because they had spare leased channels on a Sat-Gateway, which they sublet to the major International.That Major I-Carrier is out of business, and the little Carrier Company has replaced it.

I know the effects of something like this are felt globally

Often , Network World articles only highlight the short term effects, and neglect mention of the longer term plan