On Tuesday two earthquakes hit Taiwan (measuring 7.1 and 7.0) causing damage to communication channels and undersea cables.  During the first quake parts of SeaMeWe 3 (South East Asia Middle East Western Europe 3) and APCN2 (Asia Pacific Cable Network 2) were knocked out of service.  Traffic was switched to alternate routes that are now understandably heavily congested; data communications were not the only services to be disrupted, calling capacity from Taiwan to China and Japan is reduced to around 10%.  A spokesperson of Chunghwa Telecom (the countries largest telco) stated that it would take up to three weeks to fully repair the cable systems damaged in the earthquake.  A full report on the earthquakes and their effects can be found here.

After a little poking around I found that inter-office communications both within and outside of the region were running at about 40% packet loss which was making access to services like webmail extremely slow. As of this morning however there is almost no packet loss and latency is pretty much back to normal–I would be interested to hear if any readers are still being effected.