Millions of people in Taipei, Singapore, Hong Kong and mainland China were cut off from the West after a trans-Pacific cable was cut at the weekend. It'll be at least 23 days before the cable is restored.
Some slowdowns were still affecting Internet traffic between the Far East and major Web sites in the United States. Dan Todd, chief technologist of public services for Internet watcher Keynote Systems, said some companies might still experience lost data or dropped connections.
"Certainly, for multinational companies with intranets or extranets across the Pacific, this hurts," said Todd. "Email, voice-over-IP and Web traffic all travels over the same fibre."
Millions of people in Taipei, Singapore, Hong Kong and mainland China were cut off from communications to the West after a trans-Pacific cable was severed just before the weekend.
Data traveling between those cities and North America almost stopped: Nearly 80 percent of all data was lost and response times between computers on each side of the Pacific took, on average, 150 percent longer, according to a Keynote survey.
Traffic to and from Singapore was worst hit, with delays exceeding a minute for each packet, about 7.5 times greater than normal.
Other cities saw similar delays: times to Taipei quadrupled and to Hong Kong doubled, according to the survey.
Keynote said it could not get reliable data on Internet performance between mainland Chinese cities and the United States.
In other major cities in China, Web users said they were unable to visit overseas sites, although many domestic addresses were accessible.
"Restoring the cable will take 23 days," said Wang Yang, an official at the Network Management division of state phone giant China Telecom.
"We are sparing no effort to redirect traffic through other channels, but access speeds could be fairly slow," Wang said.
China has several undersea cables connecting its data networks to the rest of the world, but the Shanghai-US line carried the most traffic, she said.
While China Telecom said it could take almost three weeks to make repairs, the Internet had apparently adapted to the problem by early Friday, when companies reconfigured switching hardware to route around the cable cut.
Officials said they did not know what caused the break.
"All this talk about the Information Revolution - it can all be brought to its knees by a shark," said Steve Yap, spokesman for Internet research firm Iamasia in Hong Kong.
While a shark is probably not the culprit, fishermen might be to blame. A report on a Chinese portal site speculated that a trawler may have inadvertently snapped the cable.
Reuters contributed to this report.
