Major Internet Disruption In Asia

The fibre even survived the Tsunami two years back. Yesterday's quake in Taiwan has disrupted the internet services in Singapore,a major landing station for Asia.

A 7.1-magnitude earthquake off the coast of Taiwan on Tuesday night, which was followed by several smaller quakes in the region, apparently damaged the vast network of underwater cables that enables modern communication.
In fact major parts of Asia has been affected. South Korea said all six undersea fibreoptic cables off Taiwan were hit, causing major disruption. All services, except for exclusive business lines, returned to normal shortly afterwards as they were switched to other systems. Thailand and few other countries reported net outage. The worrying part is that it may take a long time to fix this (not in a matter of days is the immediate official reaction). In this net economy, this disruption assumes gigantic importance. Changes in undersea systems have taken place on a giant scale - not since the initial building of these networks 150 years ago have we seen such activity, mainly driven by the increase in data traffic. Experts report that systems that were built as late as 1998 proved to be inadequate for the demand in capacity required a mere 18 months later. Within a period of a few short years, there were ... at least 1,000 long-distance carriers and 10,000 ISP (Internet service providers) requiring global connectivityHopefully redundancy and continuity planning would receive its due in future. Nature is indeed the most potent force and it proves it repeatedly though in a deadly way.