Back online after few days on Chinese Mountains I discovered lots of interesting informations about Internet disruptions which occurred earlier this month and impacted more than 90 millions Internet users. Outages were due to up to cuts on up to 9 submarines cables located, for most of them, around the Arabian Peninsula.

"I Love Bonnie" published on the 12th the excellent "The Submarine Cables - A Complete Guide to the 2008 Internet Outage". The post contains tons of informations and links and provides a detailed review of the events. Media coverage can be found on Renesys site. Steven M. Bellovin professor at Columbia  University analyzed the possible causes of these outages.

Some also speaks, indeed, about conspiracy  

Myanmar is now nearly cute off from the Internet (at least for public access), as it seems clear that authorities want to crack down the outgoing flow of information regarding ongoing events.

How ever, Myanmar's Telecom officials blame a damaged submarine cable for the Internet breakdown.  

Any idea which culprit they will point out regarding numerous smashed  cellphone and cameras ?

Source: AFP 

50 days after an earthquake which damaged under sea telecommunication cables, on February 14th Hong Kong office of the Telecommunications Authority (OFTA) reported that Internet access services in the region are back to their fully capacity. 

"The earthquakes which occurred near Taiwan on December 26, 2006, caused serious damage to six submarine cable systems supporting Hong Kong's external telecommunications services. We are pleased to note that the repair of these cable systems is completed and all our external telecommunications services, including Internet access services, have been fully restored. Our Internet service providers have recovered their external connection capacity back to the normal operational level before the earthquakes," an OFTA spokesman said today (February 14).

Sources : OFTA,