Quake in Taiwan Cripples Internet

judebx writes "Powerful quakes measuring 7 on the Richter scale have struck southern Taiwan and caused damage to undersea communication cables, disrupting telephone and internet services in several parts of Asia. The quake comes on the second anniversary of the Indian Ocean Tsunami, and triggered tsunami warnings. Human casualties, however, have been low so far."

Comments

Let's wait and see

[Xenna]

what the effect on the incoming spam will be...

How do undersea cables get damaged?

[THESuperShawn]

Seriously- I am just curious. Is it possible that they were damaged by magma flow? I just find it hard to "fathom" (ba dum dum) that undersea cables could get damaged by an earthquake.

I would think that any kind of rock-slide or similar would be slowed by the friction of the water, making cable damage difficult. And I would not think that plate movement would be enough to bend or stretch the cable to the point of breaking. So how does the cable get damaged?

Surely someone here knows more about the hazards to these cables...

Re:How do undersea cables get damaged?

[ScentCone]

I would think that any kind of rock-slide or similar would be slowed by the friction of the water

Yeah, but there's still a lot of energy there, and a several hundred pound rock is still plenty able to crush the coaxial cladding of a cable draped over the sea bed. There's also all sorts of other metalic debris that can get shifted around.

I talked once to a guy that was in the business of knowing how to sabotage these things (well, not Taiwanese cables, but of course Soviet ones, spanning their Naval port areas... for a really interesting look at risky underwater espionage adventures, pick up the non-fiction "Blind Man's Bluff" for a quick read - fascinating). Whether older-style telco copper or newer fiber, the cables can be easily crimped, pinched, etc. Apparently it was fashionable to make it look like a damaged, rusty old trauler derrick (used for pulling in huge fishing nets) had been dropped over the side of a ship and just happened to land on a comms cable... all so that they could gauge how quickly and in what way strategic opponents would shift to other communication methods and go about repairs.

Re:What is the sound of one spam clapping?

[1u3hr]

Oh, right! I've got almost everything that might come down that pipe null-routed anyway.

I speak for everyone in Hong Kong, and say, fuck off and die.

95% of the world's spam is paid for by American spammers. (See the ROKSO list.) I get flooded by American spam and then get blocked by racist assholes like you.

I've been offline all day and while my email (hosted by Yahoo) is still dead somehow I can access Slashdot.

Maps of currently in-use undersea cables

[THESuperShawn]

So I went about researching this myself (thanks for the input so far) and found a few good links...

Although the layout of this page is awful (and they beg for click-fraud abuse), it does show a few really good maps of the current undersea cable infrastructure. Pretty neat stuff.

http://eyeball-series.org/cable-eyeball.htm

Re:What is the sound of one spam clapping?

[1u3hr]

Please do me a favor, since you speak for everyone in Hong Kong, and see about the other little problem (aside from the ocean of spam that does come from your neighborhood). The vast majority of the more sophisticated crack attempts that I see pounding on all sorts of systems that I touch come from Asia, and most of that from China and Korea.

Look at a map. I'm as responsible for what happens in Korea as you are for Brazil. And China is still in most ways a separate country. Telecom companies in particular are not cross border.

crap coming from your side of the Pacific..

Right. I'm responsible for the whole fucking hemisphere. 3 billion people, dozens of countries, All lumped together in your tiny mind. It's hard not to stereotype people like you in return.

And even worse, having white skin, I get blamed for what you idiots do.

Follow the traffic...

[martyb]

On the Internet Traffic Report website you can click on Asia and see where the current congestion and outages are. Scroll down to the bottom and you can see these graphs, too:

• Traffic Index,
• Response Time, and
• Packet Loss

These plots give a 24-hour window on the situation. It it's easy to see when things started getting shaken up (bad pun intended).

Each wave created more landslides

[Turmoyl]

This outage has been labeled the largest ever in the Pacific Rim region (as relayed to us by a Sprint rep).

The company I am currently employed by has a lot of affected circuits in the APAC region (a colo in Honk Kong and many offices in China, India, Singapore and Australia). The circuits belong to Sprint and OnReach, and they have both been able to determine that the earthquake itself and at least 2 of the aftershocks each created undersea landslides, and it is the detritus from the landslides that actually damaged the cables.

There's been a lot of ups and downs on the affected circuits as latent capacity is brought on-line, various peering agreements are created and/or reworked, etc. It's not going to get much better anytime soon, either, due to there being at least 7 affected undersea cables and only 2 repair ships available to perform the repairs (which, of course, requires digging the cables out from underneath all of the detritus before the repairs and redeployments can even begin).

In the immortal words of the writers of Full Metal Jacket, "It's a giant shit sandwich and we've all got to take a bite."

Re:China achieves goal of becoming LAN

[Anonymous Coward]

I am getting through to /. from Hong Kong by using a proxy in Kuwait, forced routing over Europe. Everything except Google is fuxd except of course the stuff on the China "LAN". No phones either. The ISPs here just route everything through America, apparently the operators of the cables across Eurasia charge a lot more. So much for decentralization. Also interesting to note how people here can't talk to each other because MSN Msngr etc. is unreachable.

quake (the game) cripples internet

[furbearntrout]

I noticed that quake 4 reintroduced the nail gun. In the original quake, the nail gun was able to bring down whole subnets. (The game would generate a packet for each round fired.)