Trans-Pacific Cables

Looks like last night's Earthquakes near Taiwan have knocked out internet communication across the Pacific! I can resolve sites in Hong Kong, but nothing else!

Update: PCCW et al are predicting another two days of poor internet connectivity and phone lines. I was talking to family via iChat earlier on and that was almost unusable. (Oh woe is me, my full screen internet teleconferencing is only working intermittently!) Where I'd normally have my upstream transmission at 400+kbps, it was down to about 30-40kpbs, with poor latency. (packets arriving out of order, lots of audio lag, etc).

I'm getting many sites resolving now, but loading them takes a while. It seems like it's hard to initiate a connection, but once you're there it works ok, albeit slowly. Some sites, particularly east coast USA sites seem to be still unavailable.

Hopefully things will get back under control within five days and then email will self-recover. (Sensible mail-servers allow a site to be out of action for about five days before giving up on it. It's a very resilient protocol.)