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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."
what the effect on the incoming spam will be...
I hope all is well with them over there..
am I the only one who read this and thought "wow, these id games are really hitting it off in taiwan" ?
Oh, right! I've got almost everything that might come down that pipe null-routed anyway. I feel for the cable repair guys, but...
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
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...
Repant. Thy end is sheer.
Quake 1, 2 ,3 or 4?
-Tolerate my intolerance
So, wait.
People were injured and died in this quake, and the headline is Quake in Taiwan Cripples Internet ? You insensitive clods.
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
Repant. Thy end is sheer.
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:
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).
I got up today and the net was borked. My first and immediate assumption was that some students had gone out protesting again and got massacred, and the Chinese gov. tried to shut down the internet completely to try and suppress the news.
Internet access was practically dead, but I spotted "7.1 Taiwan earthquake" in an RSS feed from Google. Google was the only thing that I use, that worked since the server was inside China.
Chinese sites were not affected and load at full speed, but anything outside mostly times out.
I doubt the strategy to route everything though a few key points for censorship purposes helps much with making the net robust against just this sorts of disaster.
Also for the poster near the top talking about spam, Taiwan isn't a major source of spam, but China is, and China was just as badly affected by the damage to the undersea cables.
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."
RAM prices, Won't somebody think of the RAM prices!
I work for a MAJOR telecom provider and this wont be fixed anytime soon. I have inside information that cable ships have been dispatched to fix the fiber cut but there is no ETA. Last time this sort of thing happened was when the sea-me-we cable was cut a couple years ago during an earthquake and effectively isolated greece for 3 1/2 weeks. Due to a lack of non sea cable bandwidth, there is no re-route possible. Affected routes are: Tokyo/Hong Kong Seoul/Hong Kong Taipei/Hong Kong Singapore/Osaka Kuala Lumpur/Tokyo Los Angeles/Hong Kong
A word to the wise... The Richter scale of Magnitude is not frequently used any longer in today's geological sciences. It is outdated, primarily because it has an inherent saturation point around 8.5. This scale was replaced in the scientific community by a much more meaningful Moment Magnitude scale, which is the number that is generally given to the media by scientists (and is referred to simply as magnitude; e.g. the quake was a magnitude 7.1). Other measurements are also meaningful for those doing the science, but the "magnitude" number is the one that is thrown to the media. Unfortunately, the media are quick to attach buzzwords to anything, and in these cases, it is often "Richter". Though the Richter measurement is likely close in value to the actual Moment Magnitude, it is a different calculation altogether, and I'm doubtful any journalist has taken the time to do the Richter calculations themselves. Though this misrepresentation may have little to do with the outages that occured, I think it wise to be aware. If you see the word "Richter" in a media story, be wary of what other words have been added that may change the meaning!
There were actually 2 distinct quakes, one magnitude 7.1, one 7.0, that occurred about 7 minutes apart, and so far have been 3 aftershocks measuring from 5.4 to 5.6 (the 5.6 being just yesterday morning). All of the quakes were very shallow (7 miles deep and less).
You can get specific information on the quakes from the USGS: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsww/Ma ps/10/120_25.php
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.)
Crap. What did the new CSS do with the "Post anonymously" option??