Evil Empire II to the rescue

There is no Yahoo!, no AOL, no BBC, no CNN. The Taiwan earthquake damage to undersea cables is now expected to take up to a week to repair. The Hong Kong government is calling for urgent meetings with the cable and telecoms companies to redesign the international networks to make sure "this never happens again".

A friend called me this morning and asked "are you out of business too?".

In the midst of all this, the only reliable connection with the outside world is through Google. Somewhere, a Google mirror is reflecting the rest of the world into Hong Kong which remains otherwise cut off. And its not just the search home page; personal home page, Google Finance, Blogger, gMail, etc. etc. are all up and running, albeit with sluggish response and various components of the homepage which don't load (those originating outside the Google Empire).

Who would have thought?

Update: I see from Fons Tuinstra (via Google Reader - can't get to the original post) that he is having the same experience in Shanghai.