My Game of Life

Wednesday, December 27, 2006

Taiwan quake disrupts communications

By STEPHAN GRAUWELS, Associated Press Writer
2 hours, 27 minutes ago

TAIPEI, Taiwan - Telephone lines and Internet service went dead across much of Asia on Wednesday after two powerful earthquakes damaged undersea cables used by several countries to route calls and online traffic.

Repairing the cables could take weeks because crews have to pull them up and transfer them to a ship for repair, said Lin Jen-hung, vice general manager of Chunghwa Telecom Co., Taiwan's largest phone company.

The quakes jolted Taiwan late Tuesday, setting off a tsunami alert on the second anniversary of the Dec. 26, 2004, waves and quake that killed 230,000 in nine countries from the Indonesian islands to east Africa.

No large waves materialized this time but two people were killed when their home collapsed.

Two cables were damaged, both off Taiwan's coast, Chunghwa said.

The company reported a 50 percent loss of overall telephone capacity, with connections to China, Japan and Southeast Asia most affected.

Chunghwa also said almost all of Taiwan's communications capacity with Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Hong Kong was disrupted. Also hard hit was telephone service to the U.S., where 60 percent of capacity was lost, the company said.

Internet access in Beijing was cut or extremely slow, while Japanese customers were having trouble calling India and the Middle East. In
South Korea, dozens of companies and institutions were affected, including the country's Foreign Ministry.

Hong Kong telephone company PCCW Ltd., which also provides Internet service, said the quake cut its data capacity in half. Many Internet users were unable to access Web sites in parts of America, Taiwan and South Korea. Calls to Taiwan weren't connecting.

Internet access was cut or extremely slow in Beijing, said an official from China Netcom, China's No. 2 phone company. The official, who would not give his name, said the cause was thought to be the earthquake, but he had no further details.

- Associated Press, Dec 27

The above article was taken from Yahoo! News (argh, Yahoo! for a Google fan), because Google News has been loading for 2 minutes, yet the only thing on the blank page is the Google logo at the top-left corner of the page. And when i tried to source for alternative news websites on its search engine, the only thing that has appeared is (unsurprisingly again) only the Google logo. An extra added bonus this time: there's the textfield displaying my keywords too. The result from my search is: "

"

To be fair, Gmail and Blogger are still the fastest loading sites for me. Hurray for Google. Not all hope is lost on Google after all. :)

I've been hearing the sentiments of disgruntled Net users all night on MSN, and some on the online forums too. Well, provided users can even access the forums in the first place. It's the first time where the amount of online contacts in my MSN contact list during peak periods like evening has amounted to less than 10, out of more than a hundred.

The computer freaks (like me) sure suffer the most. With MSN working only 20% of the time, anime and YouTube movies downloading at 4kbps, and laggy connections to game servers (if they can be even established at all), intensive computer users and gamers heavy reliant on the internet are sure left high-and-dry. And if the cables at the root of this problem really take weeks to repair, then there goes the rest of the holidays. Poof.

But humans are smart creatures, and when Plan A fails, there's always a Plan B. So i've been reading more of Terry Prachett's Discworld novels again in front of the computer screen while waiting for pages to load. No, im referring to WEB pages, not the pages in the BOOK. The latter have already been loaded by printers and ink, and have been displayed within 0.00 seconds, unlike the Google page, where the timer has already passed 300 seconds and is still counting.

And we shall hereby quote some-famous-female-tennis-player-whose-name-i
-can't-remember, when she won some-tennis-competition-i-can't-remember-either some time back and tried to call her mum to tell her the good news but her mobile refused to connect the call. In her words, "Work, technology!"

Or to be straightforward, in the words of some of my friends who have just had a looooong chat with me over MSN, "Screw the Net!"

Or to be even more blunt, in the words of most Internet users who are experiencing the lag right now, "F*** Taiwan and its earthquakes!"

Well, i can't imagine if someone tried to attain pleasure with that crack on the ground caused by a quake. It would probably be a messy scene.

Hang on a moment...can it be true?! The results page of Google just updated! Now the results read:"

News results for earthquake internet - View today's top stories
Update: Earthquake disrupts Internet acc

"

'Twas teh winnar at 9:25 pm.