Bloggus Interruptus

Three days ago there was a massive undersea earthquake near the southern tip of Taiwan. Sadly this was the very date that most people were remembering the tidal wave destruction of Boxing Day 2004.

Apart from a hurried Tsunami alert no one here thought too much about the wider consequences of this natural event.

What has transpired is a major disruption to commerce and communications in South East Asia, thanks largely to damage undersea cables and our increasing reliance on the Internet as the vehicle for most of these transactions.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars have been lost through the inability of regional share markets and banks to conduct their business and similarly large sums have been lost by budget airlines whose business is showing a decline of 20%.

Even far more modest communications such as this blog have suffered as the result of very slow web speeds.

All this goes to prove two things:

• it is very unwise strategically to rely on one fibre optic cable route and
• just how reliant we are in modern society on conducting our daily lives through the medium of the Net.

As the Melbourne Age reports this morning, this is "a sign of the vulnerability the world's telecommunications network, which was frenetically built out at the height of the internet boom but has since attracted little investment"