Asian undersea cable break causes Internet disruptions
By Sean P. Aune
A portion of the Asia-Pacific Cable Network 2 (APCN2) has suffered some form of break and is causing Internet traffic in the region to be re-routed to other cables.
It’s easy to forget sometimes that the Internet is made up of many physical parts such as servers, routers, cables and so on, but when one of those parts fails, it can bring that fact back to your thoughts pretty quickly. According to a report from Computerworld, just such an event happened Wednesday morning local time in the Asia region.
At approximately 10:50 a.m. on Wednesday, local time, a fault was detected on Segment 7 of APCN2, which is the portion that connects Hong Kong and Shantou, China. There was a temporary loss of connectivity, but the traffic was quickly shifted to other cables with spare capacity. While the exact cause of the break was not known at the time, the situation was limited to a single break that could be the result of things such as a technical fault or a cut in the line.
Occurances such as this aren’t exactly uncommon. In December 2006, a 7.1-magnitude earthquake just south of Taiwan knocked seven submarine communications cables out of service at once. In January 2008, a submarine cable connecting Egypt, India and a few other countries was broken by an accidental cut. There have been other occurrences through out the years due to numerous reasons, but part of the beauty of the Internet’s design is that it is possible to route traffic around breaks such as this quickly.
A SingTel spokesman, Chia Boon Chong, said in an e-mail statement to Computerworld:
The [APCN2] consortium members have started restoration works, and our engineers are in the process of diverting Internet traffic to other cable systems. We expect the situation to return to acceptable levels within the next 24 hours.
While some customers experienced a slow down in speeds, in general the break went unnoticed by customers.
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