What a Mess

It seems the earthquake yesterday, centred just off the southern tip of Taiwan, has damaged some undersea cables between here and there. This has taken out our (and the rest of South East Asia's) direct internet link to the US and it seems also the rest of the world. Our telecom companies have labelled this as 'disastrous' and are struggling to sort it out, hopefully by rerouting traffic west instead of east, but it seems the large financial houses have grabbed capacity early on as part of their contingency to keep running in the face of this adversity.

Yahoo and MSN are down. Access to 99.9% of websites is down. Amazingly Gmail and blogspot.com are still accessible!! Deadly slow but still producing the goods so kudos to them for obviously having some sort of plan for this eventuality - either that or they're hosted in some very strange locations!

I owe a few people emails and just wanted to get word out here that I haven't forgotten, just waiting for my hotmail account to get back up as there are emails in there for me to answer.

I think a lot of us here learned today just how much we rely on email to work, never mind play! And there's no firm commitment as to when we'll be back up, it could be a day or a week apparently.

Update: Oh dear, Gmail seems to be fading fast!!!

Update Thursday morning: Well, this is the story (from the newspaper, of course) "Operators are scrambling to repair damage to four undersea cables in the Luzon Strait between Hong Kong and Taiwan, with some estimating the multimillion-dollar job could take up to three weeks. Asia Netcom, one of the cable operators hit by the earthquake, said the damaged cables made up the main pipe that routed internet traffic to the US, stretching from Hong Kong via Taiwan and Japan. Traffic must go through alternative routes now. But the capacity along those routes is limited and all the traffic in Asia is swamping these tiny routes. People are urged to minimise non-essential internet access to overseas websites and not to keep making non-urgent overseas calls if they failed to get through."

Blogging IS essential internet access for me!! And Google (yay Google) remains the only site open to me. Oh and duh Fiona for the second time in a week, of course blogspot works, it was taken over by Google - for which I am totally grateful right now!!

I'm thankful too that I did manage to get a phone line out yesterday night and spent some wonderful time with my love. *happy happy smile*