Impact of Morakot in little red dot

Source: StraitsTimes

Typhoon slows down Internet

SOME Singapore Internet users may be experiencing slowdowns on the Information Superhighway, especially when trying to access websites hosted in the United States and Taiwan.

Typhoon Morakot, which has triggered Taiwan's worst flooding in 50 years, has damaged the Asia-Pacific Cable Network 2 submarine cable system through which bytes of information travel.

This means that people trying to connect to gaming servers in the US or trying to instant message friends overseas may find it difficult to connect.

A SingTel spokesman said that restoration works on the cable system have begun.

'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,' he said.

The last time a major outage happened was in December 2006, when quakes off Taiwan severed several cables at once, causing the Net to go down.