Quotes of the Day

In tech-addicted Asia, even a day without Internet access can trigger withdrawal. "I am depressed, very much so," wrote a blogger who calls himself Hong Kong Phooey after a Dec. 26 earthquake disrupted telecommunications across a wide swath of Asia. "No online games for me," wrote Phooey, "cannot download any new songs for my new player, cannot access my fantasy football league, no YouTube, cannot read or write blogs, and cannot get on Xbox Live 360." Another Hong Konger, 32-year-old consultant Josh Tse, reported feeling "some pain, some hollowness" after he found himself unable to update his blog, Cha Xiu Bao.

For the last two days, the story has been much the same for individuals and businesses from Thailand to Japan following the magnitude 6.7 quake, which killed two people, damaged six key undersea cables off the coast of Taiwan and threw parts of the global telecommunications infrastructure into chaos. Asian businesses were left without email, Internet service and in some cases telephone connections to the outside world. Financial markets were interrupted. Even those who found they could reach some websites experienced download speeds reminiscent of antiquated dial-up service. Communications were returning to normal on Thursday, but network problems could persist for days or weeks until the submarine cables are repaired.

For some, the outage illustrates the robustness of Asia's telecommunications infrastructure, since the quake did not cause a total blackout. Some traffic was quickly re-routed away from damaged Asian arteries through Europe and the Middle East. But for many, the unexpected return to the pre-Google era was a shocking reminder of the fragility of the technology we depend on.

Southeast Asia is unusually vulnerable to such an outage because most of the region's data travels via a handful of major cables located in north Asia that link with the rest of the world. But not only Asia was affected. As traffic was re-routed, networks on other continents were swamped with the digital overflow. "Our (corporate network) based in Germany has been completely clogged," says Ken Oka, who works for an IT consulting company in Tokyo. "All the re-routed traffic has been causing a slowdown in other parts of the world."

A spokesman for Japanese telecommunications giant KDDI says that some of the company's cables used for long-distance calls and corporate clients had been damaged; household and business telephone service was largely unaffected. "We have no idea when these lines will be repaired," the spokesperson says. While the Tokyo offices of major financial firms Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch reported Thursday that their networks were functioning normally, some businesses in Japan complained of being unable to reach clients in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Rie Kuzumoto, who works at a publishing company, needed to make last-minute changes in an order placed with a Hong Kong supplier but could not get through by email or phone. "I feel very uneasy," Kuzumoto says.

Financial markets in Tokyo and Hong Kong were unaffected. However, in South Korea, trading in the won, the country's currency, was temporarily suspended on Wednesday because networks were down. In Singapore, after-hours trading in crude oil futures was disrupted because brokers could not access market information from the U.S. Hing-fung Wong, a spokesman for the Hong Kong Monetary Association, says he heard reports of some slowdown in Internet banking services, but there was evidently no major gridlock. The Bloomberg financial news service was unavailable to many companies throughout the region on Wednesday.

For the most part, though, companies muddled through. Paul Hsu, a Hong Kong banker, says that while the Internet was running slowly, there was no panic at his office. "Things are pretty chill here," he says. Steve Rowles, an analyst at CFC Seymour stock brokerage in Hong Kong, says his company was unable to use its normal trading system on Wednesday but kept operating by routing buy and sell orders through its main office in Switzerland. But he noted that trading volumes were light because the outage occurred between Christmas and New Year's Day. "If this had happened two weeks from now, there would have been chaos in the streets," Rowles says. "I think a lot of people are still in holiday mode. The key question now is: 'When is (the Internet) going to be fully operational again?' "

Paul Budde, a telecommunications analyst based in Australia, says that the indirect impact on Asia's economy of a hypothetical total outage could easily reach $1 billion a day. Restoring communications links will take time, Budde says, because specialized ships will be needed to hoist damaged cables from the sea floor for repair. "There are only a handful of (the ships) around the world," he says. "It's not an easy job. This is going to take days." On Thursday afternoon, officials from the Hong Kong Office of Telecommunications Authority reported that two cable-repair ships had been dispatched from Singapore and the Philippines and were sailing for the quake zone.

While the holiday may have saved the region's businesses from major financial pain, Budde says that the outage could serve as a reminder to Asian countries of vulnerabilities in their Internet infrastructure. "(Governments) look at this as a telecommunications problem for telecoms to solve," he says. "But telecoms are looking after shareholder value, not necessarily the national interest. I think one thing that will come out of this is that countries will start to understand this is a national problem, not a telecom problem."

The outage inspired some personal soul-searching, too. Tse, the Hong Kong blogger, says his inability to breeze around the Internet prompted him to revert to another form of entertainment. He's reading John Steinbeck's East of Eden. "Excellent book," he says. "Reading is much easier now without the distraction and the temptation of the mouse."

• Peter Ritter
• Taiwan earthquake disrupts telecommunications