When I woke up this morning I just noticed a big decrease in traffic on many sites I own / manage. I didn’t know what is really going on, just checked my stats over and over again and couldn’t find anything strange… until I saw some news about an earthquake in Taiwan.
A powerful earthquake jolted Taiwan late Tuesday, killing two people whose home collapsed and prompting a tsunami alert on the second anniversary of the waves and quake that killed 230,000 in south Asia. (ABC News)
A pair of powerful earthquakes off the coast of Taiwan damaged undersea cables and disrupted telephone and Internet access in Asia on Wednesday.
“All of the ISPs in Singapore are affected,” said Michael Sim, a spokesman for Starhub Internet Pte. Ltd., which provides cable and wireless Internet services, referring to connectivity problems in Singapore. Sim blamed the disruption on damage to undersea cables caused by the earthquakes. Internet access in the city slowed to a crawl and some Web sites were unreachable.
“Everybody’s doing their best to migrate [traffic] to alternate routes or to fix the affected routes,” Sim said.
Japan’s NTT Communications Corp. said 84 leased lines were out of service as a result of the problems and international toll-free calling was being disrupted. Conventional international calling was in operation albeit with limited capacity, said Akiko Suzaki, a spokeswoman for the carrier in Tokyo.
In Beijing, a China Network Communications Group Corp. (China Netcom) representative, who gave only his surname Chen, said some international connections had been affected. That disruption left some international Web sites accessible in Beijing, while others could not be reached. Chen did not know when full service might be restored. (InfoWorld)
After further checking my stats, I found at that this is the cause of the dropped traffic… it looks like I am at least 25-30% dependent on China, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan traffic. Our sites register at least 75% less Chinese logins.