Earthquake cuts off telephone, Internet service

Connections to some countries were mostly restored.
TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) -- Undersea fiber-optic cables were damaged by a powerful earthquake off the southern tip of Taiwan, causing the largest outage of telephone and Internet service in years and demonstrating the vulnerability of the global telecommunications network.
Two residents were killed and more than 40 injured in the magnitude-6.7 tremor that hit offshore, near the southern Taiwanese town of Hengchun late Tuesday.
Up to a dozen fiber-optic cables cross the ocean floor south of Taiwan, carrying traffic between China, Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, the U.S. and the island itself. Chunghwa Telecom Co., Taiwan's largest phone company, said the quake damaged several of them, and repairs could take two to three weeks.
Taiwan lost almost all of its telephone capacity to Japan and mainland China. Service to the United States also was hard hit, with 60 percent of capacity lost.
Later, Chunghwa said connections to the U.S., China and Canada were mostly restored, but 70 percent of the capacity to Japan was still down, along with 90 percent of the capacity to Southeast Asia.
Magnitude of break
Stephan Beckert, an analyst with the Washington-based research firm TeleGeography, said it was the largest telecommunications failure in years.
"The magnitude of the break is surprising because Taiwan is otherwise a very well-connected system," Beckert said. He noted that cables get cut and disrupted all the time, but there's usually enough backup capacity on other lines to keep traffic flowing without customers noticing an interruption.
But with multiple cables broken in one blow, Internet traffic around the Pacific was disrupted. Hong Kong telephone company PCCW Ltd., which also provides Internet service, said the quake cut its data capacity in half. Internet access was cut or severely slowed in Beijing, said an official from China Netcom, China's No. 2 phone company.
On Wednesday afternoon U.S. time, the Web site showed limited connectivity to China, Singapore and Indonesia, while Japan and Taiwan were apparently back to normal.
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