If you are one of the unlucky ones, you may be asking yourself ‘Why is the internet so slow in China today?’ Many people are unable to use MSN Messenger, some VPN services, nor able to access sites such as Yahoo and Apple.com. The good news is it doesn’t have anything to do with the Great Firewall. The bad news is it is apparently caused by seabed movements from Typhoon Morakat and affecting several countries Asia wide.
According to China Unicom the FNAL / RNAL cable from Hong Kong to Taiwan, an important information channel, has been damaged on August 12th by typhoon Morakot. However routing was not interrupted due to certain protections so there was no impact on communications at that time. Today at around 14:20 Beijing time, the cable protection routing China’s gateway to North America, Europe and other international communications via Pusan, South Korea was damaged, caused by impacts of varying levels.
The International Business Department of China Unicom said there are currently related organizations and outside partners taking necessary measures in order to resume normal communication as soon as possible.
Although you may have trouble getting on your favorite sites today, please keep in mind there are several people who are suffering much worse due to the typhoon and I ask that you keep them in your thoughts.
