Internet crawl through South East Asia due to AAG submarine cable fault

Tortoise crawl
The world wide wait. Image source: www.esa.org
Tortoise crawl
The world wide wait. Image source: www.esa.org

If you’ve been pulling out hairs, banging tables and have been playing the waiting game with the internet, then you’re not alone. So are millions across South East Asia. And if you’ve been swearing at Unifi, Streamyx or TM, you need to stop. It isn’t the national telco’s fault. According to our friendly tech neighbours Lowyat.NET, the blame is on the Asia America Gateway (AAG).

A fault along the 20,000km cable is causing data degradation and rendering slower than usual speeds for virtually all Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in Malaysia and South East Asia.

The last we checked, we were getting 400ms pings with 50% packet loss from our server in Dallas, USA when tested on TM Unifi. On Maxis Fibre however, things are better. A little strange since Maxis does run on the TM fibre backbone. Perhaps a re-routing of packets to an alternate route?

The fault lies in the cable between Vung Tau in Southern Vietnam and Hong Kong. With Typhoon Kalmaegi running amok currently, repairs are taking longer than expected.

AAG submarine cable
Image credit: Lowyat.NET/AAG

The incident was first recorded to have occurred around 11.45PM (+8:00 GMT) on Monday, 15 September 2014.

Local sites ping and load fine, as the fault affects mainly sites and servers based in the US.

Nothing we can do at the moment except wait for repairs to be completed.

In the meantime, have some coffee and play some FIFA 14 offline?

Source: Lowyat.NET

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Vernon
Vernon is the founder and chief editor of Vernonchan.com. A graphic designer by profession, he has a deep love for technology, cars, gadgets, food, and travel. He tweets too much and is also known as a caffeine bacterium ("life's too short for bad coffee"). Bleeds Blue (go Chelsea FC!) and considers BMW, Porsche, Alfa Romeo cars to have in the garage--hallmarks of a true petrolhead.