Tuesday’s earthquake off the coast of Taiwan damaged several key underwater cables, disrupting telephone and Internet access to key markets in Asia. The magnitude 7.1 earthquake damaged the Sea-Me-We3 and APCN2 cables, according to Taiwan’s Chunghwa Telecom. As a result, Asian financial markets have struggled with telecom and Internet access to support trading activities. Satellite connectivity is being examined as on option for restoring regional connectivity, as local telecom providers say cable repairs could take several weeks.

The impact of the disruption can be seen in the performance chart for Chinese hosting provider China NetCenter, which has been unreachable from our monitoring locations in the U.S. and Europe.

Netcraft offers a web site performance monitoring service that provides detailed uptime charts, along with e-mail alerts when an outage occurs.