As the aftershocks from a massive (6.7) quake off Taiwan's southern coast began to subside, the resulting damage was beginning to show as a significant performance drop in the world's communications networks.

With almost 100% of Taiwan's communications links to its neighbours cut off, traffic of all sorts was rapidly re-routed through other sections of the web - with a noticable impact on internet performance in many countries spread across the globe.

The web as we know it was born out of the Advanced Research Projects Administration's ARPAnet project of 1969, which set out to create a massively fault tolerant IP-based network for resilient communications.

The immediate human cost was the death of two people, but the damage to South East Asia's communications system could take more than 2 weeks to fix according to sources at CNN.

The cost to trading companies working in and around Hong Kong could be massive if reports from China Daily are true and crucial financial information feeds from organisations like Bloomberg were, indeed, severed.

Taiwan's 23 million inhabitants are highly reliant on advanced, high-speed communications that allow their high-tech economy to thrive. In fact, there are more than 13 million internet users in Taiwan and the country hosts in excess of 4 million domains.

What impact this quake will have on the technology companies that HEXUS visited during our Dragon Tour earlier this month is not known at this stage, but we will be in contact with our friends over there as soon as possible to ascertain the exact situation. One thing is for sure, you would not want to be downloading drivers and other large files from a site in Taiwan at a time like this.

During times of crisis, the web is designed to maintain constant traffic between any two connected points. What the 'service providors' may not have put in the 'manual' is an estimation of the kind of bandwidth we can expect to receive following a catastrophic incident...

...external 56k voice/fax/modem anyone ?