christof's blog

Taiwan Quake Freezes Pixels

Old dependencies fade away, new dependencies arise for the mobile work and lifestyle: When the earth shook three times on the night of the 26th, making our building tremble and the wine gently swing in the glasses, we figured from earthquake watch that the epicenter of the 7.1 quake had been more than 500km away from our present location on HK island, so we didn't expect any further impacts - until I fired up my e-mail the next morning to take up my work after the Christmas holidays... Nothing. Opening websites? Nothing. Only local websites (and soon Google and some websites in Australia and NZ) were accessible.
Today, 3 days later, things have improved slightly but are still not normal (yahoo.com is still inaccessible, for the third day in a row). Blogger.com started to work a few hours ago, but I am not sure whether it is because the lines have been fixed/rerouted or whether the upcoming weekend has simply reduced the traffic within the limited pipes available.
The quake damaged 6 out of 7 submarine cables through the southern tip of Taiwan, which is apparently the lifeline to HK (rather than the PRC). News report that it may take weeks for the lines to be fixed, but rerouting was underway. Links to (westbound) worked considerable better (incl. db4o.com's own website) than (eastbound) U.S. based sites.
Well, the quake gave me a better understanding for the Internet's geography and better skills in surfing baidu.com. I didn't know that the web was so vulnerable by being concentrated in certain hotspots which intelligently enough also happen to be the most seismically active regions of the world.

posted by Christof Wittig @ 1:54 AM