Yesterday evening we found out that none of the Chinese websites are reachable.

ZM said maybe the fiber-optic cables are broken? I thought that was too drastic. But i don’t want to believe it is some kind of sick joke that the Great Firewall of China is playing. “Experimenting of cutoff all communications? because it can?” I tried our usual trick at playing mouse and cat with GFWoC, unplug our DSL modem and plug it backin, in the hope of getting a new IP. It usually works when we couldn’t reach one particular site. Never had to deal with the situation when all the sites are down.

Turned out ZM was correct. The 7.1 and 6.7 earthquake hit Taiwan also damaged 6 out of a dozen fiber optic cables lieing in the southern China sea. What’s amazing is that each cable is only 2/3 of an inch in diameter, that is only 1.67 centimeters!

It is fascinating that such a thin cable could carry so much data from continent to continent. It is amazing that all of them would be laid in exactly the same location. I guess no one thought of putting in a disaster recovery plan for that. Considering the funcky geological formation the area has…

We will see how long it will take for the rest of world to reach China, or vise versa. Meanwhile, everyone maintaining GFWoC could go home and have a peaceful New Year. Nature did a much thorough job for them.

On the other hand, maybe when the fibers are finally repaired, the entire China netizens would have learned how to use Proxy? thus rendered GFWoC useless? One can always dream. 🙂

We shall see.