The Cable is Down

There was an earthquake in Taiwan today. Luckily few people were killed and there was no associated tidal wave. Now for one of the more amusing results of this particular natural disaster - it knocked out all non-China internet to mainland China.
What?
Well apparently all non-Chinese based website information comes across one - count 'em, one - cable that comes into mainland China via Taiwan. And the earthquake took the cable out. This means that sites like blogger and Google, which have China servers apparently, are still accessible, but yahoo as well as all news servers in North American and Europe are inaccessible. Of course Chinese sites can also be reached, but as these mostly written in Chinese, they are of somewhat limited use. (Michael asked the status of other Asian sites but we have not checked if we can get onto them. We also do not understand why Europe sites are hard to reach as we would expect these to come across the mainland.)

One of the funny things was the initial aggravation with the internet while ex-pat users across China thought, 'Why is China blocking this site, gosh darn it!' After all, what on earth could Babys-R-Us possibly have that is sooo controversial? It was actually comforting to know that this was not a government decision (this time).