Why Today's Internet Connection is Down

This morning, I realized that the internet connection was unusually slow. I thought maybe it was just my area that was slow since I've accustomed to the slow broadband connection at home eventhough I'm on a 512kbps. So when I got to the office, I logged on internet and it was still excruciating slow. My office uses a 1MB broadband connection. I had no other choice but to do some other offline work instead of bothering to do stuff online.

My web hosting where I host my company's website is already dead more than a day. Shooting them an e-mail didn't work and trying to call them doesn't seem like something worth trying since the data center is located somewhere in the United State. Nevertheless, for a web hosting fees of less than USD10 a year, it's no big deal. The sad part is, I've parked 3 other domains using the same web hosting and incoming traffics to all of the other websites is also compromised.

So, why is the internet at my place here in Kuala Lumpur down? A friend of mine who happened to work at TM Net, the main Internet Service Provider told me that their internet exchange server in Taiwan got hit by the earth quake last night. The magnitude of the quake was 7.1 and 7.2, less than the previous 9.3 magnitude quake that went off the coast of Indonesia. It triggered the tsnunami warning after 2 years since the last one but the tsunami didn't happened though. More of the news here.

This is what TM Net official website announced:

I had to use Googlepages to host this image since my Photobucket image hosting can't establish any connection from where I am. It also made me realized how dependable I am to the internet. I wonder why Google is still accessible at the time of writing while Yahoo is out of reach already. Maybe the have a server farm nearby where I live. Content and web pages hosted in my country and nearby is accessible however apart from that, it's dead or extremely slow.

Here's an announcement by Jaring, another internet service provider:

They are more or less the same boat because they also share internet infrastructure. I hope they could find a way to overcome this problem.