Quake hits Asia with huge internet blackouts

If you've been wondering what's up with your Asia-based guild members on WoW, here's what: a nasty earthquake near Taiwan disrupted all six major undersea fiber optic cables on Wednesday, and knocked out internet for nearly all of Asia, with victims including China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Hong Kong and even Australia. Luckily, most services were restored quickly to backup systems, but exclusive business lines are still out, and could be hurting for weeks. According to Chunghwa Telecom of Taiwan, Taiwan's internet capacity is at "about 40 percent now," and the resultant loss of bandwidth is creating traffic jams aplenty in that series of tubes we know as the internet. Phone service, especially to the US, has also been disrupted, but luckily stock trading volumes were low over the holidays, so the financial impact of the outage shouldn't be too terrible. The damage to last night's 40-player raid, however, could prove irreparable.

[Thanks, Nevins]

[Chris @ Dec 27th 2006 3:53PM]

That explains why I was able to sign into the iTunes store!

[mark @ Dec 27th 2006 3:57PM]

...anyone else notice a slower volume of spam last day or so?

[Mrmean @ Dec 27th 2006 4:09PM]

yes!

[Charchris @ Dec 27th 2006 4:19PM]

Thats sad...

Yeah maybe the spammers are enjoying their holidays

[david @ Dec 27th 2006 4:52PM]

Most spam actually comes from the US.

[Mike @ Dec 27th 2006 5:09PM]

Yup, I could attest that business is indeed affected. I'm a DSL Tech Support rep in the Philippines and our link @work was indeed affected since before noon yesterday, phone link to the US was interrupted (intermittent at best) and is still not operational. No ETR as of this time (a holiday break for us nonetheless, but it ain't good at all for business). Although I was able to send this comment at through my DSL connection at home, Internet access is at worst intermittent.

[shoppingcart @ Dec 27th 2006 6:46PM]

And here are photos of them repairding the busted cables: http://digg.com/tech_news/Photos_Single_Internet_straw_breaks_No_Internet_access_for_Asia/blog

Underwater (like Steve Irwin)

[Bryan @ Dec 27th 2006 7:37PM]

So, uh... it must've had Quad Damage!
*rimshot!*

[Dennis @ Dec 27th 2006 9:08PM]

I'm sitting over here in a Malaysian hotel... cursing... I can't even check my email...
:(

[booger62 @ Dec 27th 2006 9:13PM]

this has really affected the email between our us and asia sites. It has really affected ccw, and has dropped the remote connections to a crawl. Hopefully it'll get fixed soon.

[WS @ Dec 27th 2006 10:36PM]

I am writing from Hong Kong. The ISP I use is one of the ones suffering from the massive outage. I only manage to reach 'outside' of HK by using proxy servers. Right now, I am using a proxy server in Dubai, and I seem to have pretty much full access to all websites, including IM.

But the problem is serious! I am surprised to see the relatively little coverage in the Western media. Much of Asia has been cut off. Even telephone services are interrupted. We rely on the Internet so much, when problem like this happens, all of a sudden, the 'single point of failure' becomes so apparent.

[nikster @ Dec 28th 2006 12:07AM]

Thailand - internet much slower than usual, yesterday was a near-standstill. Today it seems to be coming back to life.

[ekarat @ Dec 28th 2006 12:51AM]

I'm suprised that you guys only worried about not being able to check mail, getting on the web, sign in to iTunes etc. while there are people who are suffering from the effect of the earthquake. I guess you guys don't even know where Taiwan is.

[Version 1.0 @ Dec 28th 2006 8:14AM]

From Malaysia... Things were not going well yesterday, but now its back... Kinda slower than usual tho...

[Jamar @ Dec 28th 2006 2:23PM]

Well, I'm on the mainland (china). I had to wait so long for this page to load, and most other sites won't load at all. I thought it was a broken modem or router- called tech support and they told me about this incident. I wish people made a bigger deal out of something like this- there can't be a single point of failure for any country's connection to the internet. I wonder how the people are doing, though- I'll ask some of my Taiwanese classmates when they get back from their visit there after winter break. Then again, I wonder how many of them will make it back OK (unfortunately, some of them are so annoying that I wish that they'd not come back- things like telling me to shut up and do my work when they're carrying on a conversation and slacking off and I look at them, pounding on a door when they can't open it and I happen to be behind it- I walked in through the door next to the one they were pounding on, etc- with the Indonesian kids they seem to have the worst tempers, but the nice ones more than make up for the mean ones)

[Roy @ Dec 28th 2006 3:37PM]

oh, so thats why yahoo.com.hk was down yesterday or (hk.yahoo.com) and all the other sites... cool

[China Law Blog @ Dec 29th 2006 1:30AM]

Our Shanghai office is without internet access, but Blackberry went live yesterday morning in Shanghai. What is going on elsewhere in China? Good thing it's the holidays.
www.chinalawblog.com

[Tristan @ Dec 29th 2006 2:35AM]

HELP US!!! OUR INTERNET CONNECTION IS DOWN HERE IN THE PHILIPPINES! LOL!
WE CAN ONLY ACCESS FEW WEBSITES GOOD THING I CAN ACCESS ENGADGET!!!!

[Veto @ Dec 29th 2006 6:58AM]

With the scheduled repairs will probably take 3 weeks, I decided to help the asians surfers a bit by how to overcome their "speed" and "connection" problems on my blog. Check

[Veto @ Dec 29th 2006 7:04AM]

sorry bout the post earlier. ie sigh :P
here's the add

http://www.octalforty.com/octalified-guide/octalified-guide-survivors-guide-to-internet-outage-introduction/

:)

[Kip HT @ Dec 30th 2006 6:07AM]

Thank God!! The internet is back in business. Here in hong kong it has been slowed down to a crawl. it kind of works here with all the accelerators i have. when pinging something it almost always times out. i felt my building wobble when it happened. went to bed and when i woke up there was no internet at all. taiwans internet was out by 98% at first. im about to try using a proxy server to get better speeds

[Kip HT @ Jan 6th 2007 8:08AM]

Thank God!! The internet is back in business. Here in hong kong it has been slowed down to a crawl. it kind of works here with all the accelerators i have. when pinging something it almost always times out. i felt my building wobble when it happened. went to bed and when i woke up there was no internet at all. taiwans internet was out by 98% at first. im about to try using a proxy server to get better speeds

[akshay @ Jul 5th 2008 4:05AM]

After all earthquake is a natural disaster, no matter how we afraid of it or try to avoid it but it's a fact which has taken the lives of the million. The big corporate houses of manufacturing, finance, currency trading , constructions houses will demolish in a few seconds due to its affect.
Many attempts have been made already to escape from earthquake, new technology, is keep on giving stress on finding new ways to save ourselves from this hazard.
But after all only destiny knows who will going to flee from this monster.
In the end whatever we say it is also the fruit of our deeds.