It was a tsunami for the digital age, a natural disaster of the virtual world that radiated through much of Asia and beyond after an undersea earthquake late on Tuesday off the coast of Taiwan.
People awoke on Wednesday to find themselves without e-mail or the Internet and, in some cases, without telephone connections, cut off from the world around them.
The earthquake ruptured undersea cables that are part of a communications fabric that circles the globe.
PHOTO: AFP
Coming on the second anniversary of the Asian tsunami that killed 230,000 people, it was a reminder of the world's increasing dependence on communications technology.
Financial companies and technology services suffered most directly. Operations from travel agencies to newspapers to schools struggled to maintain their routines.
"You don't realize until you miss it how much you rely heavily on technology," said Andrew Clarke, a sales trader in Hong Kong. "Stuff you took for granted has been taken away and you realize, `Ah, back to the old way, using mobiles.'"
In this time of rapid change, it is easy to forget how quickly innovations have become necessities, from cell phones to the Internet to e-mail to instant messaging on both the computer and telephone.
"I'm completely dependent on the Internet," said Robert Halliday, an American writer based in Bangkok. "If the Internet goes down for half a day, people can just stay in bed in terms of getting any work done."
On Wednesday, he was stymied in trying to get information for a review he was writing of a Romanian DVD. It takes a moment to realize what a task that would have been just a few years ago.
Indeed, the words "instant" seems to have lost some of its edge. It has become the norm and anything else seems agonizingly slow. The word "global" has shrunk to the size of a computer screen.
When Halliday's mother, who is in her 80s, wants to reach him, she taps an instant message into her telephone from the US. "All of a sudden," he said, "there's a message on the phone, `Oh, you should be here, the azaleas are out.'"
Without e-mail, Ken Streutker, a Dutch-Canadian actor and producer in Thailand, had no way to arrange a meeting with a friend who was arriving at the airport in Bangkok.
"Now I'll have to stand there at the airport with the traditional handwritten sign and hope that someone notices," he said.
Many companies found that their operations were paralyzed without the Internet.
In Beijing, Wang Yifei (
"I had a horrible day," she said. "I've been complaining about this all day. This high-tech world of ours. It didn't happen in the old days. In the end I can't do anything."
In Manila, the Philippines, Abe Olandres, who owns and runs a Web-hosting company, just about gave up. He said he planned to try a Wi-Fi hot spot in a coffee shop after struggling at the office all day.
"This is killing me," he said.
For his customers, it may have been worse. When their service went down, they tried to reach his help desk, but it was down, too.
Niall Phelan, the creative director of APV, a media production company in Hong Kong, said he usually received about 300 e-mail messages a day.
On Wednesday, he said, he got none.
Without e-mail, he was back to the old-fashioned way of communicating -- by telephone -- which greatly multiplied his work.
"Usually, one e-mail is [copied] to lots of people," he said. "But, with calling, you have to contact all six involved people individually."
With their work day disrupted, he said, "Most people I spoke to in Hong Kong today are just twiddling their thumbs."
He made the best of it.
"What I did today was eight hours of filing," he joked. "I had a year's worth of paperwork. If the Internet is still down tomorrow, maybe I will finish it."
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