Broken Internet Line... Sigh

In the recent earthquake off the shores of Taiwan, several Asian countries were plunged to pre-Internet days when one of the underground cables were severed in the quake. Almost all sites in the US, Europe, Hong Kong and China were inaccessible.

Though it is claimed that Internet has been restored by rerouting traffic to other cables and satelites, some of us still have trouble getting into any of the websites not local to Asia. Some may be able to access the web sites but the latency is way high. A ping to google.com showed up at 800ms and some timed out.

Officials at Taiwan has confirmed that ships has been sent out to rectify the problem. However it is said that the task will be time consuming as the ships will only arrive at the location at about yesterday(tuesday).

By the way, these cables are worth billions of dollars and are often longer than 11000 miles in length, so imagine how difficult it must be to find the damaged area. Could you even imagine living without the internet nowadays?