Surfing in Hong Kong

G'day from a slightly chilly, smoggy Hong Kong. Seems I can't escape technology news. Last Tuesday's Taiwan earthquake cut six of the seven undersea cables that carry Hong Kong's internet services.
It's been a disaster for small business and operations like Crossroads, the NGO we are visiting, which relies on the Internet to communicate with the world. My brother in law, Mike, who runs something akin to a humanitarian eBay called Global Hand, was scratching his head in disbelief. It seems 90% of Hong Kong's internet traffic travels via Taiwan, and now the city understands the problem with that kind of single point of failure-type exposure.
The South China Morning Post ran the internet story as its page 1 lead on Friday, and spilled to a whole page of coverage on different angles. Reminded me of the sort of coverage we give big issues at the Fin, except we don't stop at just one page of coverage.. : )
Anyway, getting back to Mike - he was telling me how the only internet service that has worked in recent days was Google. He learnt about the Internet disruption by reading the headlines in Google News (he doesn't have a TV). Google's Hong Kong cache has come into its own, serving up content when access to US sites was impossible.
Today is the first day I've tried and been able to get on to US sites like Typepad with any degree of speed to write this blog. Gmail has worked the entire time, but not Yahoo! Mail. Interesting.
Meanwhile, here's a shot of my daughter and I doing our worst impression at the Bruce Lee statue (in case you're worried I've been doing little more than thinking about HK's Internet woes....).