Singapore-Wide Network Slowdown

[b]Singapore ISPs were affected by the disruption of an undersea cable due to an earthquake in Taiwan yesterday.[/b]

Since early this morning, Singapore’s internet connectivity has been drastically reduced, with many popular websites such as Yahoo, YouTube and Wikipedia either loading very slowly, or being unable to load at all. Other internet based software such as popular instant messenging client MSN Messenger and Valve’s Steam game launcher has been affected as well. Singnet’s [url=http://www.singnet.com/]website[/url] cannot be reached as well. It appears that the majority of locally hosted websites are not affected.

Initially, the cause of the problem was not known. However, Starhub has released the following announcement via it’s website, clearing matters up.

[QUOTE]27 December 2006

Dear valued MaxOnline customers

Due to an earthquake in Taiwan yesterday, the undersea cable was disrupted resulting in slow Internet access to some international sites. You can be assured that our topmost priority is to quickly restore services and we have deployed all available resources to address the situation as soon as possible.

Since yesterday, we have started re-routing the affected Internet traffic to other routes. Our engineers have been working round-the-clock and are doing their best to rectify the matter as soon as possible.

We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience caused and thank you for your patience. An update will be provided as soon as we can.

Regards
StarHub Web Administrator[/QUOTE]
Source: [url]http://www.starhub.com/online/customersonly/index.html[/url]

While the announcement was for Starhub’s MaxOnline customers only, it is thought that the same undersea cable disruption is responsible for the disruption in internet connectivity experienced by customers of the other major ISPs in Singapore.