World Wide Help: Quake in Taiwan Disrupts Regional Communications

Enda Nasution from Global Voices Online just emailed me saying that the internet connection in the region has been disrupted due to the Taiwan earthquake last night and that this has been confirmed as disrupted access from Singapore, Indonesia and Thailand.

Can't really find all the details, but I can confirm that Internet access is disrupted in Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia. Heard that 6 core underwater cables is broken, but can't find the source on this. Singaporean users can't access international sites. In Thailand, connection is on and off, can't (or really slow) to access Google and Yahoo.

Via a listserv on Global Voices Online, GV authors began to confirm outages from their cities:

Fons Tuinstra in China, mentioned that the connectivity is at the least spotty.

I could not get a whole bunch of harmless websites, even not through a proxy, so there seems to be a physical barriers that could be caused by the earthquake. Some things are still going here in Shanghai. Larger parts of the internet are working here in Shanghai. Most of the Google-services I use have no problem, although linking through Google News to other sites is problematic. No problem to update my weblog, but others have more problems.

Ching Chiao in China stated that since the earthquake had hit Ping Dong (the southern point of Taiwan) badly where most of the international Internet traffic gets in / out (about 30-40Gb he assumed), net connectivity services had taken a major outage. He mentions that he can't make any calls to China or Japan and translates a brief from a Taiwan news report:

Since last night, the connectivity between Taiwan and South East Asia is down to 2% thruput rate, Taiwan - India completely disconnected once. After lunch today, Taiwan - Japan only 30%, Taiwan - South East Asia 10%. A full recovery of services may take 2~3 weeks.

ThauRum Bun in Cambodia wrote in to say that the situation was the same to what was happening in Phnom Penh where Cambodia's got internet up links from these neighboring countries.

Neha Vishwanathan in India says:

I'm in Hyderabad and been experiencing really slow net access for a while now, called up the ISP and it turns out that the submarine cables have affected access here too.