Asia’s Earthquake-inspired internet blackout

On December 26, two years exactly after the earthquake-inspired tsunami that took the lives of an estimated 230,000 people in Southeast Asia, the sea floor 13 kilometers off southern Taiwan gave way, generating a temblor that reached 7.1 on the Richter Scale. The quake did relatively little damage, except to some of the 18 undersea fiber-optic cables, e…