Taiwan Earthquakes Interrupts Telecommunications Across Asia
Filed in: Technology, Tmnet — December 27th, 2006
If you experienced interruptions of phone and web services in Asia, you are not alone. The recent strong earthquakes in Taiwan damaged a few undersea cables. Repairing the undersea cables will take two to three weeks.
Jaring and TMnet had also make related announcements on their websites.
“The recent earthquake in Taiwan (and its related aftershock effects) has caused major outages of international connectivity due to multiple submarine cable failures in the affected areas. JARING international links are also affected since 3:46 am this morning (27 Dec 2006).” - JARING- Announcements
“We wish to inform our customers that the Internet service is currently experiencing a degradation in performance caused by several outages at some of the international links. This is attributed to the Richter 7.1 magnitude earthquake that struck off the southern coast of Taiwan at 12.07 a.m. on 27th December 2006, which caused the APCN2 (Asia Pacific Cable Network 2) submarine cable fault between Shantou, China and Tanshui, Taiwan and between Lantau, Hong Kong and Chongming, China.
This has caused outages at several TM Net international transit and peering links, mainly to the said countries. As a result, Internet users in Malaysia and other parts of Asia may be experiencing some delay when assessing content and websites hosted outside of Malaysia, especially in U.S., Japan, China, Taiwan, Korea and Europe. TM Net has taken immediate action to divert traffic through other back-up links to reduce the traffic congestion.” - TM Net - Newsroom
My personal experience
I was unable to access Internet in the morning (Dec 27). My mother’s phone call to my auntie in Taiwan also not reachable.
In the afternoon, I was able to surf local websites but international sites were mostly time out. Internet access was getting slightly better at the midnight/early morning (now). Still, my works are seriously interrupted. 
How is your Internet connection? Please let me know that I am not alone. 
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December 28th, 2006 at 2:16 am
Use proxies, I surf as usual with it.
December 28th, 2006 at 2:32 am
@Vincent: you are using proxy in which country?
December 28th, 2006 at 9:28 am
Bear thinks we need more internet cable. Perhaps 10x more to surf comfortably.
Using multiple proxies can help, linking through multiple other routes.
December 28th, 2006 at 10:12 am
my surfing speed is not really affected..
my gaming speed is badly affected though..
December 28th, 2006 at 10:47 am
I’ve blogged about my internet connection yesterday. Can’t really rely on it these days.
December 28th, 2006 at 10:57 am
Australia proxy works great, it’s fast.
December 28th, 2006 at 12:30 pm
my connection too slow yesterday, but not sure is this the reason… they said its happening in entire chennai.
December 28th, 2006 at 2:38 pm
My friend, Mr. Badak, said it is a “CyberTsunami”.
December 28th, 2006 at 4:19 pm
These are australia proxies that work great for me..they are still working at the moment im posting this..
165.228.132.10
165.228.128.10
165.228.133.10
165.228.130.10
All of them use port *3128*
December 28th, 2006 at 4:36 pm
Yes, Australia proxy works great.
December 28th, 2006 at 5:06 pm
it just give an effect to the internet line, not the phone line. anyway, my internet speed was too slow yesterday. but it’s quite right now even not good as i expected.
December 28th, 2006 at 5:22 pm
International calls are affected as well.
December 28th, 2006 at 11:27 pm
liew, have you read my comment?
btw if i use proxy, my firefox can’t open websites.
December 29th, 2006 at 1:47 am
@CypherHackz: yes, i read. thanks for tagging. If you cannot open website after using proxy, try to change another proxy server.
December 29th, 2006 at 2:18 am
My apartment one is unable to connect for few days already. But at my friend’s place here, it’s able to connect to any webpage, just slower…
December 29th, 2006 at 8:30 am
same issue in Penang even with PenangFon. Local sites and normal but anything overseas drops to below 1Kb. This is bad……
December 29th, 2006 at 9:33 am
Our Shanghai office is without internet access, but Blackberry went live yesterday morning in Shanghai. What is going on elsewhere in China?
December 29th, 2006 at 1:35 pm
[...] OK, so you have read in multiple places that you can enhance your browsing speed by using proxies in the South Pacific countries, such as in here and here. If all of those seems to be so technical for you don’t be sad. Simply put, proxies are used to be a intermediate to help your HTTP/S (web) traffic to go through a different route than the normal (congested) one. [...]
December 30th, 2006 at 12:41 am
seems like it is over now. my connection back to normal speed now.
January 3rd, 2007 at 11:10 am
still doing quite badly after one week of fixing
January 3rd, 2007 at 2:53 pm
I can access any websites even local since 30th dec till today. The problem is become worst than before 30th because i still can access some local websites but not now. Is it the same problem or not only the cause of earthquake? It passes already a week to fix it so i think the problem should be going better but not going worst :((
I need internet to do my work at home but i cant do anything now….
January 12th, 2007 at 2:12 am
[...] According to TM Net latest news, the international link outage caused by Taiwan earthquakes will be fully restored by January 20th, 2007 (there is a typo on the page). [...]