The earthquake yesterday in Taiwan has apparently damaged the fiber optic cables between China and the USA and therefore damaged the Internet connectivity between China and the rest of the world. At least it is very difficult to access MSN Messenger and other US based services.

I was wondering why I didn’t see Xinyue online today and why there wasn’t response for the text messages. I was missing her and then I found out the reason in one of the blogs I read regularly, in the post 24 Hours Internet without U.S.. This just shows us how fragile our Internet world is sometimes – suddenly you will be without a connection and you have to start figuring out how to communicate. And according to my experience, there seems to be problems also when trying to call landline or mobile phone numbers in China. Maybe all existing cables are heavily utilised.

This reminds me about the time when I was still studying and the fiber optic cable used by academic universities broke down between Europe and the USA. We had to rely on the backup cable, which wasn’t so fast at all and suddenly you didn’t feel like accessing too much American sites any longer. Well, it got fixed eventually and I forgot the whole problem. Until now.

Let’s hope they can get those cables fixed as soon as possible.

Edit: at least CNN and AP are reporting about this in their news sites.