Quake in Taiwan Cripples Internet

judebx writes "Powerful quakes measuring 7 on the Richter scale have struck southern Taiwan and caused damage to undersea communication cables, disrupting telephone and internet services in several parts of Asia. The quake comes on the second anniversary of the Indian Ocean Tsunami, and triggered tsunami warnings. Human casualties, however, have been low so far."

Let's wait and see

what the effect on the incoming spam will be...

Re:Let's wait and see

it is very hard to tell, according to the news, only 1 or 2 cables are actually working among the 7 cables in the sea. first of all, not all the cable systems have the same bandwidth. most of the submarine cable systems are segmented, and traffic is routed to the "landing station". different cable systems have different landing stations in the country. the cable systems in HKG have 4 or 5 different landing station. as for taiwan, the map that i am referring to - 3 in northern taiwan, and 1 in southern taiwan. then, traffic will get re-routed to an alternate path within a cable system if it's designed as non-linear system. otherwise, if the cable system is linear, the traffic will actually need to get to another peering (interconnection point) and hop to another cable system for re-routing. consider the path from asia to US, those re-routing can easily cost application timeout. also, not all the cable systems have the same amount remaining capacity. since each submarine cable system is not likely owned by one individual provider (usually it's 2 or more and it works like consortium), so a wide range of customers will be impacted. and it's a ripple effect ... the only 2 cables that are available are simply being OVERLOADED with unexpected traffic. in a nut shell, it's impossible to tell the impact for a isolated region(in this case, taiwan). however, if a company has purchased a totally diverse path and have their traffic re-route to an alternate path, they will be okay if they re-routed the traffic to Japan, or Australia, and then go to US. damn it! who would think that 7 cable systems (EAC, FLAG, APCN, APCN2, SMW3, C2C, etc) are all having landing station/cables in taiwan. now we are talking about diversity in the sea ... it's a physical layer issue (layer 1) ... www.telegraphy.com has nice cable maps, but you need to subscribe to see the map.

Re:Let's wait and see

"so they are actively pursuing ways of crippling the spammers."

I vote for axe handles. Or, tie them to a bed, and smash thier ankles with a sledge hammer. That worked for Cathy Bates.

Re:Let's wait and see

service to other parts of SE Asia is diminished or cut off.

Here in Malaysia, the internet pretty much disappeared around 2am yesterday (26 hours ago). I went to sleep, figuring it was just a local outage.

The next morning, it still wasn't really working, which is unusual. Most internet users here are English speakers and US content is in high demand, so all most people care about is connectivity to American servers. Some traceroutes showed that the normal crystal-clear 300ms transpacific route from Kuala Lumpur to Los Angeles had become a 2000ms epic voyage via west Asia, London, and the Atlantic, with 75% packet loss. This is apparently the only backup option that the national ISP has arrangements for.

Later in the day, people started to realize that routes to Thailand and Australia (and from those countries onward) were unaffected by this, so many in Malaysia have begun using public HTTP proxy servers in those two countries. Web site performance thay way is pretty much as good as before the outage. That's no help for SSH, VoIP, SMTP, and the like, though. And I imagine it'll start to get blocked by the proxy operators if it continues for a few more days - Malaysians are a nerdy and bandwidth-ravenous bunch.

It's now 4:30am, and the situation via London is considerably better - 700ms pings and 20% packet loss. But I imagine that when everyone wakes up in a few hours, the link will once again be clogged and we will all return to mourning the loss of the Taiwan cable.

Singapore is in the same boat as Malaysia, though they are - as usual - a bit more on the ball and were able to come up with better-performing alternate links more quickly.

Indonesia is also affected, though I understand there are formalised arrangements via Australia.

Nobody knows or cares about Brunei, but if I had to guess, I'd say they are probably completely dependent on Malaysia for IP connectivity.

North of here (Thailand, Burma, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam) connectivity does not seem to be significantly impacted.

No idea about the Philippines, but it's usually safe to assume they have gotten the worst of any unpleasant situation.

quake cripples internet

I hope all is well with them over there..

am I the only one who read this and thought "wow, these id games are really hitting it off in taiwan" ?

What is the sound of one spam clapping?

Oh, right! I've got almost everything that might come down that pipe null-routed anyway. I feel for the cable repair guys, but...

Re:What is the sound of one spam clapping?

Oh, right! I've got almost everything that might come down that pipe null-routed anyway.

I speak for everyone in Hong Kong, and say, fuck off and die.

95% of the world's spam is paid for by American spammers. (See the ROKSO list.) I get flooded by American spam and then get blocked by racist assholes like you.

I've been offline all day and while my email (hosted by Yahoo) is still dead somehow I can access Slashdot.

Re:What is the sound of one spam clapping?

And even worse, having white skin, I get blamed for what you idiots do.

Look, I don't care what color you, or anyone else is. I care what they do. The systems I deal with have nothing whatsoever to do with your daily life (especially since you use a Yahoo account). I'm just telling you facts: there are large IP blocks serving Hong Kong, much of China, Taiwan, Korea, etc., that are, for me and my users, a source of essentially nothing but spam and endless cracking attempts. So until that ratio changes to something more like what I see out of, say, Brazil or Germany, it pretty much all just gets stopped. I'm injecting network geography, not race into this. You're the one that's got race stuck in your head. Packets have no color to me, they just carry the intent of the person sending them, or the carelessness of the person using an unpatched, pirated O/S that's being a slave to the person sending them.

You are the one that said you speak for everyone in Hong Kong, and I replied in a way to point out how ridiculous that sounds. You can't have it both ways.

How do undersea cables get damaged?

Seriously- I am just curious. Is it possible that they were damaged by magma flow? I just find it hard to "fathom" (ba dum dum) that undersea cables could get damaged by an earthquake.

I would think that any kind of rock-slide or similar would be slowed by the friction of the water, making cable damage difficult. And I would not think that plate movement would be enough to bend or stretch the cable to the point of breaking. So how does the cable get damaged?

Surely someone here knows more about the hazards to these cables...

Re:How do undersea cables get damaged?

Unfortunately, all it takes is a large rock weighing a few tons with a sharp edge to fall and cleave a cable that's laying against a flat rock on the bottom. I don't know precisely how the transcontinental cables are built, but the smaller ones I've dealt with for river and lake crossings are quite vulnerable. They're stiff as hell (don't react well to bending), somewhat brittle (don't react well to bending or crushing), and designed to be laid and buried, and never move again (don't react well to general movement). A sharp vertical motion could crack them, or a rolling motion could set them up to be crushed by flying debris (quakes can be very fast, even underwater, hence tsunami generation). There's lots of ways for a cable to die.

Re:How do undersea cables get damaged?

stiff as hell (don't react well to bending), somewhat brittle (don't react well to bending or crushing), and designed to be laid and buried, and never move again (don't react well to general movement).

I suddenly had this deja vu feeling where I'm hearing my ex-wife talk on the phone with her girlfriends.

Re:How do undersea cables get damaged?

...and designed to be laid and buried, and never move again (don't react well to general movement).

I suddenly had this deja vu feeling where I'm hearing my ex-wife talk on the phone with her girlfriends.

Hans, is that you?

Re:How do undersea cables get damaged?

Well, the tubes are often made of glass, and vigorous shaking will crack them. Then, water rushes into the tubes and the poker chips float up while the racing horses drown, clogging up the internets. It's pandemonium, I tell ya. If only the internet was a big truck...

Re:How do undersea cables get damaged?

Well, the tubes are often made of glass, and vigorous shaking will crack them. Then, water rushes into the tubes and the poker chips float up while the racing horses drown, clogging up the internets. It's pandemonium, I tell ya. If only the internet was a big truck...

Should we also perhaps be worried about the affect on marine and seabird life from the resulting v1@gr4 slick? Maybe good for the whale populations to help them recover from Japanese "scientific" whaling? I, for one, welcome our new potent and satisfied cetacean overlords.

Re:How do undersea cables get damaged?

I would think that any kind of rock-slide or similar would be slowed by the friction of the water

Yeah, but there's still a lot of energy there, and a several hundred pound rock is still plenty able to crush the coaxial cladding of a cable draped over the sea bed. There's also all sorts of other metalic debris that can get shifted around.

I talked once to a guy that was in the business of knowing how to sabotage these things (well, not Taiwanese cables, but of course Soviet ones, spanning their Naval port areas... for a really interesting look at risky underwater espionage adventures, pick up the non-fiction "Blind Man's Bluff" for a quick read - fascinating). Whether older-style telco copper or newer fiber, the cables can be easily crimped, pinched, etc. Apparently it was fashionable to make it look like a damaged, rusty old trauler derrick (used for pulling in huge fishing nets) had been dropped over the side of a ship and just happened to land on a comms cable... all so that they could gauge how quickly and in what way strategic opponents would shift to other communication methods and go about repairs.

Maps of currently in-use undersea cables

So I went about researching this myself (thanks for the input so far) and found a few good links...

Although the layout of this page is awful (and they beg for click-fraud abuse), it does show a few really good maps of the current undersea cable infrastructure. Pretty neat stuff.

http://eyeball-series.org/cable-eyeball.htm [eyeball-series.org]

Version?

Quake 1, 2 ,3 or 4?

Re:Version?

Quake 1, 2 ,3 or 4?

Quake 7 according to one Mr Richter.

Multiplayer Quake

did always have inefficient network code, it was only a matter of time...

Sure...

"Human casualties, however, have been low so far." Wait until all those gold farmers can't get into World of Warcraft... we'll see some human casualties then.

Priorities

So, wait.

People were injured and died in this quake, and the headline is Quake in Taiwan Cripples Internet ? You insensitive clods.

Spam

My Spam levels just dropped in half! SpamAssassin is not working near as hard as it was before Christmas. I feel for the guys out there fixing all the broken fiber.

So what?

I don't think why I should care. Power systems break down all the time. Telephone systems less often. A decentral net is the best of all worlds. So the solution is to identify national strategic dependencies and seek alternatives.

Hmmm...

Title and summary contradict one another: "Quake in Taiwan Cripples Internet" and "Human casualties, however, have been low so far."?

You'd think with so many people running around with Rail Guns and Rocket Launchers in DM3, there'd be plenty of dead space marines...

tragic, but

where will I get my cia1i5 now?

You know you're on a nerd website when....

"Powerful quakes measuring 7 on the Richter scale have struck southern Taiwan and caused damage to undersea communication cables, disrupting telephone and internet services in several parts of Asia.... Human casualties, however, have been low so far."

when.... the disruption of the internet trumps the part about human casualties!

Only Quake?

Their Internet was crippled by Quake? What the hell is gonna happen when they start playing Q3A?

Follow the traffic...

On the Internet Traffic Report website [internettr...report.com] you can click on Asia [internettr...report.com] and see where the current congestion and outages are. Scroll down to the bottom and you can see these graphs, too:

• Traffic Index [internettr...report.com],
• Response Time [internettr...report.com], and
• Packet Loss [internettr...report.com]

These plots give a 24-hour window on the situation. It it's easy to see when things started getting shaken up (bad pun intended).

In Soviet America...

In Soviet America Quake 4 cripples Internet 2

The game

Was I the only one who that it the title was referring to the id game "Quake", not an earthquake?

China achieves goal of becoming LAN

I got up today and the net was borked. My first and immediate assumption was that some students had gone out protesting again and got massacred, and the Chinese gov. tried to shut down the internet completely to try and suppress the news.

Internet access was practically dead, but I spotted "7.1 Taiwan earthquake" in an RSS feed from Google. Google was the only thing that I use, that worked since the server was inside China.
Chinese sites were not affected and load at full speed, but anything outside mostly times out.

I doubt the strategy to route everything though a few key points for censorship purposes helps much with making the net robust against just this sorts of disaster.

Also for the poster near the top talking about spam, Taiwan isn't a major source of spam, but China is, and China was just as badly affected by the damage to the undersea cables.

Each wave created more landslides

This outage has been labeled the largest ever in the Pacific Rim region (as relayed to us by a Sprint rep).

The company I am currently employed by has a lot of affected circuits in the APAC region (a colo in Honk Kong and many offices in China, India, Singapore and Australia). The circuits belong to Sprint and OnReach, and they have both been able to determine that the earthquake itself and at least 2 of the aftershocks each created undersea landslides, and it is the detritus from the landslides that actually damaged the cables.

There's been a lot of ups and downs on the affected circuits as latent capacity is brought on-line, various peering agreements are created and/or reworked, etc. It's not going to get much better anytime soon, either, due to there being at least 7 affected undersea cables and only 2 repair ships available to perform the repairs (which, of course, requires digging the cables out from underneath all of the detritus before the repairs and redeployments can even begin).

In the immortal words of the writers of Full Metal Jacket, "It's a giant shit sandwich and we've all got to take a bite."

In other, completely unrelated news...

Prices of WoW gold skyrocket 300 fold.

My poor helpdesk

As 1/3 of our frontline staff is based in the Philippines, it has all been rerouted to our canadian contact center. With an expected outage of 3 weeks im sure most of our guys are gonna burn out from the call driven overload.

I wonder how many overseas outsourced operations will be affected by this. Probably not a good time to be calling your major branded PC manufacterer for support.

I always thought

that the internet had a very robust Department of Redundancy Department. Shouldn't this be a wake up call to all of us that if you want reliable internet, you have to break it free from the corporate mono culture that it and all of our present day communication infrastructure suffers from? Start with good wireless, perhaps? If we don't, you will soon see intentional shutdowns. And on another note, the people who make all of the equipment that makes the internet work and all of your computers and such belong to a pretty exclusive club. They can shut you down PDQ also. As far as expanding our freedoms, the whole internet thing is turning out to be one big disappointment. It is almost as tightly controlled as all the other mass communication technologies we have. Unless your machine gets smashed by falling debris, you should be able to network to other computers no matter where they are. Maybe the internet works just fine for DoD, but for the rest of us, it's no better than Ma Bell's phone service.

A communications disruption...

A communications disruption can mean only one thing: Invasion!

FPS

>> Quake in Taiwan Cripples Internet

They must really love first person shooters in Taiwan!

Dont expect this to be fixed soon

I work for a MAJOR telecom provider and this wont be fixed anytime soon. I have inside information that cable ships have been dispatched to fix the fiber cut but there is no ETA. Last time this sort of thing happened was when the sea-me-we cable was cut a couple years ago during an earthquake and effectively isolated greece for 3 1/2 weeks. Due to a lack of non sea cable bandwidth, there is no re-route possible. Affected routes are: Tokyo/Hong Kong Seoul/Hong Kong Taipei/Hong Kong Singapore/Osaka Kuala Lumpur/Tokyo Los Angeles/Hong Kong

Internet Crippled at Home

I feel for them and hope for a quick recovery.
Around this house,It's Quake III crippling the internet connection.

Blackhole APNIC

No need to wait for quakes to knock out the spammers and hackers
in the far east. A couple of hundred lines in iptables silently
rejects incoming packets from APNIC. End of problem. Once implemented
I saw an orders-of-magnitude reduction in spam and hack attempts.

Pffft. Gone.

Loss-of-life not required.

mike

Talk about lag...

I knew Korea was into gaming but I didn't think it was so big in Taiwan that it could cripple the internet.

Happy? Fear for your GPUs instead

It seems like a lot of people on this thread are rejoicing that the spammers will be hurt. Well, as others have already said, the true source of spam is not Taiwan.

And instead of "Yay, no spam" you should really be saying "Oh shit, where will we get our graphics cards from?" (Or really, "Wow, I hope no one was injured or killed" -- but is that asking too much?) If Taiwan gets seriously hurt, prices for processors of all sorts, and especially graphics processors, will go through the roof. Open your computer case sometime and check where all those components were designed and built... And hey, why not try to be a little less racist, too?

good map of global submarine fibers

http://www.cybergeography.org/atlas/alcatel_large. gif [cybergeography.org]

Richter schmichter...

A word to the wise... The Richter scale of Magnitude is not frequently used any longer in today's geological sciences. It is outdated, primarily because it has an inherent saturation point around 8.5. This scale was replaced in the scientific community by a much more meaningful Moment Magnitude scale, which is the number that is generally given to the media by scientists (and is referred to simply as magnitude; e.g. the quake was a magnitude 7.1). Other measurements are also meaningful for those doing the science, but the "magnitude" number is the one that is thrown to the media. Unfortunately, the media are quick to attach buzzwords to anything, and in these cases, it is often "Richter". Though the Richter measurement is likely close in value to the actual Moment Magnitude, it is a different calculation altogether, and I'm doubtful any journalist has taken the time to do the Richter calculations themselves. Though this misrepresentation may have little to do with the outages that occured, I think it wise to be aware. If you see the word "Richter" in a media story, be wary of what other words have been added that may change the meaning!

Chinese Visitors

Interesting...though my website's (primarily Chinese) traffic has slowed to a trickle since yesterday, I have gotten a few hits from Hong Kong, Malaysia, Guangdong and Jilin. I wonder if they're not connected through Taiwan?

Sensationalist News

The quakes disrupted cables primarily dedicated to business use, such as for currency exchange with banks. I am currently living in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, () which is the 2nd biggest city in Taiwan on the southern side of the island (less than 50 miles from the quakes), and I was online during both quakes and never experienced any interruption in service or slowdown. In fact I was using it at the time to chat with friends here and to e-mail home that I was fine.

There were actually 2 distinct quakes, one magnitude 7.1, one 7.0, that occurred about 7 minutes apart, and so far have been 3 aftershocks measuring from 5.4 to 5.6 (the 5.6 being just yesterday morning). All of the quakes were very shallow (7 miles deep and less).

You can get specific information on the quakes from the USGS: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsww/Ma ps/10/120_25.php [usgs.gov]

I'm such a geek...

When I first read the headline, I thought it was the GAME Quake.... aarrgg..

Really slow transfers from Israel

Downloading a movie from Israel is going at 19kB/sec. Amazing how an earthquake in Silicon Valley affects Silicon Valley but an earthquake in Taiwan affects everyone.

affected

i'm from the philippines and the connection right now is horrible. it is spotty and i am able to access slashdot right now albeit very slow.

i am concerned about what happened here's why.

the earthquake happened dec. 26, 8:26pm local time (same time zone with taiwan.) during that time, the internet connectivity was still working ok (i accessed the net at around 10pm and surprised to see at tsunami alerts in my country.) there was no increased latency or packet loss. it was only until the morning of the following day that the connectivity started failing. my questions are:

1. did the cables break sometime during the night after debris may have loosed and damaged the cables?
2. did governments shut down commercial internet services in order to allocate remaining capacity for themselves? or did carriers cut out other customers to give preference to some?
3. why is it that asia is affected? if ever the entire landing station in taiwan is offline and cables are cut from there, the cables are operating in protected ring configurations and should have rerouted automatically.
4. if it failed, do telcos remove the protection and instead just increase their bandwidth usage (for pure profits?)
5. do all the cable systems pass through the same physical path (which is unlikely but with what happened, it makes me think so?)
6. it has been reported that china, korea and japan are among those affected but a lot of cable systems land on their countries going to us directly. how do they configure their network that something so far affects them? (i would assume that majority of southeast asian countries will be affected and will spare china, japan, korea.)

it just frustrates me that with all the technologies available today, the carriers' networks are still very frail. in addition, i would like for carriers that they not drop packets during congestion as it makes it almost impossible to access hosts. the added latency will be much welcome for me (my thinking that connections will be congested not because of new traffic but because of retransmissions.)

Quake

Millions of Asian people... Quake 3... tubes being clogged... IT ALL ADDS UP!

Re:Gah!

No! To make an earthquake-resistant internet you need to make it out of _stretchy_ tubes!

Re:Gah!

Earthquakes are so common in Asia, I don't know why they didn't do this!

Tornados are common in mid-USA, earthquakes are common in California, blackouts are common in the tri-state area.

What is not common is knowing exactly when, or where, they will strike. Not everyone has travelled back to 5 November 1955 [wikipedia.org] and knows the exact such details about a lightning strike!

The cost of laying an undersea cable is HUGE. It is impractical to maintain a thick sheath the entire undersea length. It is only on the ends where the cable comes ashore that much thicker and sturdier sheathing is used because friction and anchors are a lot more common in that area.

I think you'll find for all intents and purposes undersea cables are manufactured to withstand expected engineering problems. But planning for an earthquake is best mitigated by a self-healing ring such as the topology used for the Southern Cross cable [southerncrosscables.com] between the USA and the South Pacific.

Re:Connection flaky

Yes, the Internet does work around breakages. It doesn't necessarily work that well.

Call me crazy, but wasn't that what {*cough*algore*cough*) DARPA designed it for? The fact that it still WORKS - just slower - means it's working JUST as it should.

Re:Cripples internet?

It's not just Taiwan. Most of us in the Asia-Pacific region have experienced network outages today. I'm speaking from Singapore, which is almost as far as you can get from Taiwan and still be in the APAC region (except for our Southern neighbour Indonesia, of course).

just like their reliable dvd players

The ones that die when the fans stop spining to cool them down because they get increased friction.

In reference to cheap dvd players that die when get too hot, they should just make them properly shutdown/power off when too hot, not
just blow a capacitor.