In what local analysts are blaming on the 6.7 earthquake off the coast of Taiwan yesterday, communications and Internet access throughout Asia have been disrupted.
Mainland Chinese users trying to access websites like Hotmail.com, Yahoo.com, or most any other website hosted outside of mainland China are finding them very slow to load, or not displaying at all.
Using proxies also is thwarted, as bandwidth coming into and leaving China has dwindled to a slow trickle. Websites hosted within mainland China, like Sina.com.cn, appear to be loading as normal.
A China Netcom representative says work is continuing on fixing any problems, but online reports say the interruption might last up to three weeks. The affected undersea cables have also caused problems in areas like Thailand, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Indonesia.
Would China not be better prepared for such disruption if they didn't insist on so tightly controlling access to international sites? It seems clear that most or all international traffic from China is routed via the South China Sea and little or none travels overland. Presumably it is easier for Internet monitoring to take place when just a few lines can be monitored but we now see how risky that approach is. One of the greatest ideas behind the Internet is its ability to carry on working even when some areas of the network are dead but this idea is pretty redundant if you route all your network traffic through the same geographical place.