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

quake cripples internet

[CreatorOfSmallTruths]

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" ?

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:Let's wait and see

[raju1kabir]

service to other parts of SE Asia is diminished or cut off.

Here in Malaysia, the internet pretty much disappeared around 2am yesterday (26 hours ago). I went to sleep, figuring it was just a local outage.

The next morning, it still wasn't really working, which is unusual. Most internet users here are English speakers and US content is in high demand, so all most people care about is connectivity to American servers. Some traceroutes showed that the normal crystal-clear 300ms transpacific route from Kuala Lumpur to Los Angeles had become a 2000ms epic voyage via west Asia, London, and the Atlantic, with 75% packet loss. This is apparently the only backup option that the national ISP has arrangements for.

Later in the day, people started to realize that routes to Thailand and Australia (and from those countries onward) were unaffected by this, so many in Malaysia have begun using public HTTP proxy servers in those two countries. Web site performance thay way is pretty much as good as before the outage. That's no help for SSH, VoIP, SMTP, and the like, though. And I imagine it'll start to get blocked by the proxy operators if it continues for a few more days - Malaysians are a nerdy and bandwidth-ravenous bunch.

It's now 4:30am, and the situation via London is considerably better - 700ms pings and 20% packet loss. But I imagine that when everyone wakes up in a few hours, the link will once again be clogged and we will all return to mourning the loss of the Taiwan cable.

Singapore is in the same boat as Malaysia, though they are - as usual - a bit more on the ball and were able to come up with better-performing alternate links more quickly.

Indonesia is also affected, though I understand there are formalised arrangements via Australia.

Nobody knows or cares about Brunei, but if I had to guess, I'd say they are probably completely dependent on Malaysia for IP connectivity.

North of here (Thailand, Burma, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam) connectivity does not seem to be significantly impacted.

No idea about the Philippines, but it's usually safe to assume they have gotten the worst of any unpleasant situation.