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A week after Typhoon Morakot hit internet connectivity in east Asia, a major earthquake off Taiwan has now drastically slowed internet service.

The quake off Taiwan’s east coast on Monday morning has cut multiple cables, industry sources said, including the Reach-FLAG FNAL/RNAL cable.

The outages echo the virtual shutdown of regional internet connectivity in December 2006, when a huge earthquake sliced six submarine cables off Taiwan’s southern coast.

Monday’s quake, which measured 6.5 on the Richter scale, has severely restricted access to foreign websites from Hong Kong and mainland China for much of the past two days.

In a poll on the sina.com website late yesterday afternoon, 46.2% said they could not access any foreign websites and another 37.0% said the bandwidth speeds were “very slow”. Popular apps and websites like MSN and Yahoo were unavailable for much of the period, users complained.

China’s biggest fixed-line carrier, China Telecom said it had experienced “a series of breaks” in subsea capacity off Taiwan. By noon Tuesday it had recovered to 60% of lost capacity. It was working with other international operators and expected to have 75% restored by today or Thursday.

China Unicom said yesterday it had restored about three-quarters of capacity lost through break in FNAL/RNAL system, owned jointly by Flag and Reach. A spokesman said he hoped that services would be fully restored “within a week or so.”

Flag declined to comment. A Reach official said the company was using “interlink infrastructure” on APCN2, built after the 2006 quake, to restore circuits. 

PCCW, Hong Kong’s biggest ISP, said “multiple submarine cable faults” had occurred but could not say when they would be repaired.