Quake Disrupts Internet in Asia

Two Quakes which struck off the coast of Taiwan measuring 6.7 and 7.1 on the Richter scale damaged the undersea cables which carry internet traffic and voice. As a results internet and phone services throughout Asia have been hit.

Wednesday’s earth quake has damaged two out of four undersea cable which pass via Taiwan and connect Pacific with Asia. Nearly the whole of Asia went on blackout with Taiwan being the most badly hit country.


[Photo: Undersea Cables]

The traffic which passed through these cables were switched to alternate routes, but those cables are now congested, leading to slower internet speeds. Few exclusive business lines are still out and it might takes weeks to be fully restored.

I woke up last morning and discovered that my 256 kbps line had weirdly started acting like a dialup connection, I called the BSNL customer care and as usual they had no explanations to give. I’m sure most Asian bloggers had also faced some difficulty in blogging.

Read More @ Computer World, Wikinews

This post was published by on December 28, 2006

About the Author: Thilak Rao works as a Social Media Expert. He is one of the first professional bloggers from India, and he loves to write, travel and click photos. Follow him on Twitter @thilak

  • http://www.techlive.co.nr Phalgun

    Yes Thilak. Yesterday night I kept a file for downloading and I noticed that it was very slow. Yesterday Ashish’s site was also not loading as he hosts in a Malaysian based company.

  • Javid

    damn! so this is the reason for my slow internet speed. now i have to wait another week until they fix it. i hope everything will be fine very soon.

    regards
    Javid (colombo,sri lanka)

  • http://www.visualreactor.org Rohit

    That actually explains a lot of slowdowns …
    must have been scarry huh ? Waking up and having your broadband act like dial up :P

  • Karthik

    My airtel was down for a moment in the morning but now everything is lightning fast..

    btw did you check the mail i sent..

  • http://www.WiseTome.com/Splat Vyoma

    Oh yes. I did face this. Both at home and at office.

    The office people did indicate that this was the case.

    My ISP (Tata Indicom), quite similar to BSNL were not able to answer my questions, but after I came to know of this, I think we just have to wait it out.

  • http://sankaranand.com/blog Sankar Anand

    hey thilak thats great, my internet connection is damn slow and whenever i log in to sify they say “due to international submarine cable failure you may experience slow internet speed please bear with us” but thanks for the photo you placed there . anyways i think it will take a week…. but my isp providers were atleast able to answers it thats great for them…

  • http://tech-buzz.net Thilak

    Sankar: Now that what they need to do. We want our ISP to be transparent, but they refuse to !!

    You know these BSNL folks, one who is metric pass can join them as a employee and he gets a grade of an engineer. I agree that its a moral boosting measure, but they do need to educate their employees.

    Few of them don’t even know what is BroadBand. You won’t believe me, but the one who came to setup broadband at my place started asking me “Where is My Network” !!

    Now that’s what I call as INSANITY

  • http://blog.sankaranand.com Sankar Anand

    you were right ! i too experienced that with bsnl customer care during times of dial up connection

  • http://www.visualreactor.org/ Rohit

    That actually explains a lot of slowdowns …
    must have been scarry huh ? Waking up and having your broadband act like dial up :P