via Joi Ito's Blog:
news on sina.com.cn, in which China Telecom, one the biggest ISPs in China, release an official statement:
China Telecom has confirmed that, according to China institute of earthquake monitoring, at Dec 26, 20:26-20:34 Beijing Time, 7.2 and 6.7 magnitude earth quake have occurred in the South China Sea. Affected by the earthquake, Sina-US cable, Asia-Pacific Cable 1, Asia-Pacific Cable 2, FLAG Cable, Asia-Euro Cable and FNAL cable was broken and cut up. The break-off point is located 15 km south to Taiwan, which severely affected the International and national tele-communication in neighboring regions.
It was also reported that communication directed to China mainland, Taiwan, US and Europe were all massively interrupted. Internet connection to countries and region outside of China mainland became very difficult. Voice communication and telephone services were also affected.
China Telecom has claimed that due to the aftershock of the earthquake, the repairing works would be very tough. In addition undersea operation is also not easy to handle with. So this phenomenon is going to exist for certain period.
According to CNN, Chunghwa Telecom is reporting that a "damaged cable interrupted communications with Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Hong Kong. Communications with China were also cut off because calls to the mainland from Taiwan are routed through Hong Kong.".
BBC has even more details about the quake and the outage, saying that it could take 3 weeks to repair.
In South Korea, broadband provider KT Corp said six submarine cables had been affected, interrupting services to customers including banks.
Some foreign exchange trading was reportedly affected.
"Trading of the Korean won has mostly halted due to the communication problem," a dealer at one South Korean domestic bank told Reuters news agency.
Some major internet backbones to Asia have been destroyed -- isn't the internet supposed to be more resilent than this? In the meantime, maybe they can float some Wi Fi buoys in the ocean while they repair the downed cables.
Of course, as far as gaming goes, for all you MMOG players that have to face Asian guilds killing your spawn, now's the time to take advantage of their (essentially) three-week downtime to have your way with the ubers.
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