Here’s the bad news.

A 7.1 Richter Scale earthquake hit southern Taiwan yesterday, injuring 42 people and killing 2.

The Taiwan weather bureau says aftershocks of 5.0 magnitude are expected within a week.

Our thoughts and prayers go out to the people of Taiwan, especially since the earthquake might trigger a regional tsunami to the neighouring countries.

Even though Singapore is a couple of thousand miles away, we were spared either.

A number of submarine data cables were damaged, disrupting Internet access. [At this time, google, gmail, clickbank and my email accounts are inacessible].

The fact that I have DSL and cable modem connections to 2 different Internet Service Providers hasn’t helped either. Taiwan is one of the major Internet gateways between Asia and the rest of the world.

Although Internet connectivity has been rerouted to other connections, I believe the ISPs are metering the available bandwidth. Sites are loading up slowly and though HTTP access is available to some sites, email isn’t readily accessible.

This means I can’t access email sent to me via the contact form.

If you need to get me, you can insert a comment in the blog comments, including your email address.

Here’s a Bloomberg report on the Taiwan earthquake:

–> Taiwan Earthquakes Kill 2, Disrupt Power, Telephones

(They use a wonky link structure so if that fails, head to Bloomberg.com direct or google for “Taiwan earthquake”)