While a complete picture of the situation is still emerging, CommsDay understands that APCN2, APCN, EAC and SMW3 were impacted near Taiwan, adversely impacting traffic flow in and out of the region.

 
A ComputerWorld Singapore report put the time of the fault on APCN2 at 10:50am Wednesday. The affected segment was between China and Taiwan, forcing regional Internet traffic to be routed onto other systems. The report suggests that the APCN2 cut impacted the performance of the Internet for users in South East Asia.

The report also highlighted two previous faults on APCN2 - on Segment 7 connecting Hong Kong and Taiwan and on Segment 1 connecting Singapore and Malaysia. The sources told ComputerWorld that the cause of the fault was still unknown. However, a Straits Times report is suggesting that Typhoon Morakot, which triggered massive flooding in Taiwan, is the cause of the latest APCN2 cut.

A spokesman for Pacnet also confirmed to ComputerWorld that there were "double faults" on its pan-Asian EAC system off the coast of Taiwan over the weekend. According to the report, the EAC cable experienced its first cut in the early mornings of 9 August on a segment linking Taiwan and Hong Kong and a second cut on another segment linking the two countries roughly 12 hours later. Pacnet also gave no explanation for the EAC cuts. Pacnet was not immediately available for comment.

In addition to the Singapore report, Smart Communications in the Philippines also acknowledged some impact to its international voice and SMS services.

As of 7:30pm on Wednesday, Asian nodes monitored by the Internet Traffic Report website, which tracks the performance of Internet traffic, registered lower than average performance scores and extended response times. With the exception of Japan and Taiwan, all other nodes in Asia monitored by the site registered performance index scores of lower than 80, resulting in an average performance index score for the region of 70 out of 100 - compared to 86 out of 100 globally. Singapore (54 out of 100) and Qatar (33 out of 100) registered the lowest scores.

Response time for much of the Asian nodes were well above 200 milliseconds, with Qatar's itr-test.isp.qa registering a response time of 615 milliseconds, compared to the fastest node in Japan, which had an average response time of 127 milliseconds.