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."

Re:How do undersea cables get damaged?

[dpaton.net]

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.

China achieves goal of becoming LAN

[rumplet]

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.

Dont expect this to be fixed soon

[rivetgeek]

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

Re:Let's wait and see

[hkg168]

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.

Richter schmichter...

[aldebaraan]

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!

Re:Let's wait and see

[raju1kabir]

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.

Sensationalist News

[Dak RIT]

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]