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Web surfers washed up
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MILLIONS of people across China were unable to access much of the Internet on Friday after an undersea cable was severed, and an official at China Telecom said it could take 10 days to fix the problem.
The year-old China-US cable was thought to have been severed by Chinese fishing boats around 7.45am about 320 nautical miles off Chungming on China's southeastern coast.
Internet users in major mainland cities, including Beijing and Shanghai, said they were unable to access overseas Websites, but could visit some Chinese addresses.
The break slowed Hong Kong Internet traffic to snail-pace.
“It's been very frustrating,” said Ric Shreves, CEO of Dots and Loops, a company that creates websites for corporations.
“If this had been a Friday when we were delivering a website to a client, it would have been terrible.''
The site's Singapore users complained that they were not connecting to pages at all, but getting error messages only.
“We had tremendous problems all day,'' said Elaine Leung, founder of Paddyfield.com, Hong Kong's answer to Amazon.com. “We rely on the Internet 24 hours a day. Connections to some of our suppliers became incredibly slow.'' She said on-line businesses such as hers, which sells books, were particularly at risk when the Internet went down.
Taiwan reported that a cable break had prevented most of its Internet Service Providers (ISPs) from connecting users to servers off the island.(SD-Agencies)
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