Taipei, Taiwan – With one blow, Mother Nature triggered the largest telecommunications outage in years, cutting off or slowing telephone and Internet traffic in Asia from Beijing to Bangkok.
A powerful earthquake off the southern tip of Taiwan late Tuesday damaged up to a dozen fiber- optic cables that cross the ocean floor south of Taiwan. They usually carry traffic between China, Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, the U.S. and the island itself.
The magnitude-6.7 temblor, which struck near the town of Hengchun, killed two residents of Taiwan and injured more than 40 people.
It also showed the vulnerability of the global telecommunications network.
Chunghwa Telecom Co., Taiwan’s largest phone company, said the quake damaged several undersea fiber lines, 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 hit hard, with 60 percent of capacity lost.
Later, Chunghwa said connections to the U.S., China and Canada were mostly restored, but 70 percent of capacity to Japan was down, along with 90 percent of capacity to Southeast Asia.
“The magnitude of the break is surprising because Taiwan is otherwise a very well-connected system,” said Stephan Beckert, an analyst with the research firm TeleGeography.
He said cables get cut and disrupted all the time, but there’s usually enough backup capacity to keep traffic flowing without a noticeable interruption.
