24 Hours Internet without U.S.

It is exactly 24 hours after the earthquake in Taiwan. The earthquake caused 6 major fiber cable between China and U.S., between Korea and Hong Kong, and between Hong Kong and Shanghai were broken.

This is according to local news:

20:25 China-U.S. Cable broke
20:25 Asia-Europe #3 Cable broke
00:06 Asia-Pacific #2 S7 broke
02:00 Asia-Pacfic $2 S3 broke
20:43 Flag from Korea to Hong Kong broke
04:56 Flag from Hongkong to Shanghai broke

For the whole day, servers outside China (in U.S. or Europe) were not accessible. From my personal experience, this is a list:

home.wangjianshuo.com (very slow. It takes 5 minutes to open this editing page).
Gmail.com - very very slow, and almost not accessible
MSN Messenger - completely unable to logon
Skype - it still works

All other sites in US, very slow.

In China, the Internet experienced 24 hours without connection to U.S.

Local v.s. International Sites

In the morning, friends started to spread out QQ numbers, and I know many people have to turn on QQ or register QQ.

Gmail is not working, and hotmail.com is not accessible. To send a file to my friends who uses @163.com email address, I registered a new @163.com email address to ensure delivery.

eBay.com.cn is not accessible for many hours, and I don't know how many users switch to Taobao.

This time, not 1 cable was cut off - it was 6 cables that was cut off. It is said it takes at least one month to recover. It takes only 21 days to form a habit. To get used to a new site takes much less time. This must be a huge opportunity for local web sites.

by Jian Shuo Wang on December 27, 2006 under Internet

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Comments

I assume there is also some problems getting through to Chinese telephone numbers from outside of China. At least I am having problems while trying to call mobile number and landline number from Europe.

Posted by: Miikka on December 27, 2006 9:52 PM

When tried to access SINA from US, the front page is open faily fast, however get to click any link on the front page took long time to open.

Posted by: BLUEKITECN on December 28, 2006 1:11 AM

MSN can logon this morning, but just several minitues later, it was not accessible in WUHAN.This caused many problems for me to contact my client and my party fellows. Wish those cable problems could recover asap.
Another things I'm intrested is whether this damage will be a huge opportunity for WUHAN's cable manufactories.

Posted by: Melissa Du on December 28, 2006 2:27 PM

how can you get on the internet with out a landline

Posted by: sarah on October 16, 2008 11:59 PM