If you’ve been wondering what’s up with your Asia-based guild members on WoW, here’s what: a nasty earthquake near Taiwan disrupted all six major undersea fiber optic cables on Wednesday, and knocked out internet for nearly all of Asia, with victims including China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Hong Kong and even Australia. Luckily, most services were restored quickly to backup systems, but exclusive business lines are still out, and could be hurting for weeks. According to Chunghwa Telecom of Taiwan, Taiwan’s internet capacity is at “about 40 percent now,” and the resultant loss of bandwidth is creating traffic jams aplenty in that series of tubes we know as the internet. Phone service, especially to the US, has also been disrupted, but luckily stock trading volumes were low over the holidays, so the financial impact of the outage shouldn’t be too terrible. The damage to last night’s 40-player raid, however, could prove irreparable.

source :http://www.engadget.com/2006/12/27/quake-hits-asia-with-huge-internet-blackouts/