Fiber cut slow down Philippine Internet

Advisory: There is a major fiber cut in the Southeast Asian region that is affecting internet connectivity. Thankfully, BNS hosting is multi homed. This means our BGP routing automatically re-routed traffic to other internet gateways that were unaffected by the fiber cut.

From PLDT Advisory:

The APCN2 multiple fiber break is currently causing major slow down in ALL PLDT/IGATE internet access. Also, their EAC Cable is having multiple troubles as of the moment. Re-routing were already implemented thus incurring heavy traffic in the said cable systems.

From ASTI.Dost.gov.ph

Now confirmed that APCN2, C2C and EAC are cut. also unconfirmed reports of SMW2 and SWM3 are out. FLAG and TGN seems to be not had any issues so far.

It seems at this point, the fault is more on the South China Sea and the alarms I got seem to confirm that. For the geography, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:South_China_Sea.jpg

Circuits from Japan to SG, TH, PH are down, but not to HK. My perspective, yours may vary.
– -gaurab

From ZDnet:

A cut in the Asia-Pacific Cable Network 2 (APCN2) undersea submarine cable crippled connection speeds for users in the Asia-Pacific region on Wednesday, particularly in Singapore and the Philippines.

Users were sending updates to local forums and Twitter, complaining of slow connection speeds to sites hosted outside of the region.

According to a notice sent by Malaysian telco, TM Net, the cable fault was traced to segment 7 of the APCN2, which stretches between Shantou, China and Tanshui, Taiwan. TM Net traced the outage to Typhoon Morakot, which hit the region over the weekend.

Additionally, segment 1 of the APCN2 is also currently under repair. Repairs on segment 7 are expected to commence after work on segment 1 is completed.

Internet connection speeds are expected to return to normal late evening Aug. 13, according to the advisory.

Singapore operator, SingTel, confirmed the cable fault in an e-mail to ZDNet Asia, saying that customers can expect to face high latency as a result. It added that its STIX (SingTel Internet Exchange) Internet backbone provider is working on rectifying the issue.

A status update posted on InternetTrafficReport.com showed SingTel’s Singapore gateway registered a score of only 34 points, compared to the global average “health” of network connections, which was 86 points as at 3pm Singapore time on Wednesday.

The site first started registering slower response times and packet loss in Singapore at 8pm Tuesday evening.

Back in 2006, the APCN2 was taken out by a powerful earthquake in Taiwan. Internet access was reportedly badly disrupted and halted in some parts of Asia after the quake