It’s yet another Boxing day earthquake, this time in Taiwan. The first struck at 8:26pm [7.0] followed by another 8 minutes later at 8:34pm [7.1] on Boxing Day (26.12.2006), according to USGS. There are so far 2 dead, 42 injured, according to the Taiwanese news. It is fortunate that this has caused less damage than the quake on Sep 21, 1999 which killed 2400 people all over Taiwan, and it did not caused a tsunami like the Indian Ocean quake on Boxing Day 2004.
Several submarine cables off Taiwan’s coast were damaged. Chunghwa Telecom, one of Taiwan’s main telco, said this caused a 50% loss of overall telephone capacity in Taiwan, with connections to China, Japan and Southeast Asia most affected. According to an article on AP, Internet access in Beijing was cut or extremely slow, while Japanese customers were having trouble calling India and the Middle East. In South Korea, dozens of companies and institutions were affected, including the country’s Foreign Ministry.
|
I have outages in the office starting from 8:10am today and it was certainly annoying. Connection for Bloomberg terminals was out along with a trading system called EBS Spot. Even Bloomberg TV in my office was down. I had a ‘good time’ trying to call up the tech support of these services only to find their lines equally dead because they were overwhelmed by calls. It was also a busy day for my regional office as they had to co-ordinate with their vendors to get the connections with the rest of the branches in Asia before Europe trading hours. My poor friend doing system integration also had a good time running all over to his clients and face the music over something that isn’t his fault. It is undoubtedly, a ‘Black Day’ for all of us in the IT line. |
 There has been a breakdown in transmission… |
I snapped this photo of the plasma TV in my office before I went out for lunch. The StarHub line for it has gone dead for at least half an hour by then.
It will be awhile before Internet connectivity returns to normalcy as repairing the cables could take weeks because crews have to pull them up and transfer them to a ship for repair. And the lag is starting to drive me crazy already. * sigh *