E-Media Tidbits

CBSnews.com CBS News has more coverage of Asian communication outages caused by yesterday's earthquake. (Click for story.)

Does your online venue have an Asian audience? Maybe not today -- at least, not so much.

Yesterday's earthquake not only killed two people in Taiwan, but also damaged undersea cables that provide Asia with Internet access.

Reports on Wednesday morning signal severe problems with net access (and possibly other services) in Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore, China, and Hong Kong. The problems vary greatly, probably depending on the measure providers took to manage traffic.

Here in Beijing, traffic seems rather undisturbed -- as in Shanghai's Pudong business district. Elsewhere in the city most sites are not accessible.

Surprisingly, all Google services are up and running, allowing the exchange of information.

For China, this is the first major breakdown since the beginning of this century. Before that, connectivity had been troublesome in the first years of China's presence on the Internet.