| Thursday, December 28, 2006 |
| Google is earthquake proof; Hong Kong internet down but Google still working |
Last night at about 8pm I (Mike) felt the sofa shaking ever so slightly. It was a bit more than a mobile phone vibration, but I checked both our phones which were sitting on the sofa. No messages or missed calls. It lasted about 3 or 4 seconds and Helen said she thought of felt something but wasn't convinced.
This morning I got to work and passed our IT guy on the stairs. "The internet's down", he informed me. I jokingly asked if he was referring to a global internet collapse, or simply our connection to the big wide web. It was only later that I discovered my question was much more appropriate than I realised.
An earthquake occurred near Taiwan yesterday (Tuesday 26th), 7.1-7.8 (varying reports) on the Richter scale. Our internet connection is still mostly down, although strangely I can access a few HK-based websites (including ours), and Google. But with the rest of the web (all the international sites I use) down, it makes Google pretty useless, and my job rather difficult, as one of my main roles is a researcher!
From the short Google News summaries, it seems that two people were killed and dozens more (about 40?) injured when some buildings collapsed. I think the UK (possibly Scotland) also had an earthquake yesterday, about 3.5 on the Richter scale), but as we don't have a TV and the only thing I can read online is the Google News story summaries, it's a bit hard to tell what's happening out there. What is it with disasters happening on Boxing Day this century?
I'm intrigued why Google is the only non-HK site working. I noticed ages back that Google were hiring in HK, so they must have an office here by now. I wonder if they have a local copy of the web in HK, to speed up their China service? That would explain why they are working, along with other HK sites, but US and UK sites are inaccessible.
Here's a few news stories about the 'quake (I think) that I haven't been able to read:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
http://www.nytimes.com/...
I started writing this post offline, and then realised that as Google was working, Blogger might be too... and it is! So we can post here.
UPDATE: I have also loaded half of an Australia Sky News page. So, it looks like our international connections are being restored. But BBC, CNN, Yahoo, Hotmail, ABC and others still down.
UPDATE: Might be good to mention that we're doing fine. That was probably implicit in my description of our experience of the event, but good to be clear for our families reading this.
UPDATE: It's now the morning of the 28th and still no internet beyond the mighty Goog. |
posted by Mike & Helen @ 7:32 AM   |
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| 2 Comments: |
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The explaination is a reasonably simple one. The quake took out several of the major fibre optic links in Taiwan on which a great deal of the internet traffic for Hong Kong is carried. This resulted in a great deal of packet loss for sites external to Hong Kong, thus the ability to half load some foreign pages. Connectivity to local Hong Kong sites was not affected.
Google is a mighty internet juggernaut who have multiple points of presence around the globe. The Google search is not done in realtime, the majority of the contents of the internet are cached at each point of presence allowing the superfast searchs to which we are accustomed.
End the lesson here...
Tom
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Thanks, Tom! Where would we be without your internet wisdom, o wise one!
What about outside access to HK sites? Can you access the ones I listed in my next post? ....and dare I ask about GH?
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The explaination is a reasonably simple one. The quake took out several of the major fibre optic links in Taiwan on which a great deal of the internet traffic for Hong Kong is carried. This resulted in a great deal of packet loss for sites external to Hong Kong, thus the ability to half load some foreign pages. Connectivity to local Hong Kong sites was not affected.
Google is a mighty internet juggernaut who have multiple points of presence around the globe. The Google search is not done in realtime, the majority of the contents of the internet are cached at each point of presence allowing the superfast searchs to which we are accustomed.
End the lesson here...
Tom