The hot topic at the APAN meeting this week in Manila, Philippines was the Taiwan earthquake that took out several undersea telecom cables in December. There were several good presentations about the actual situation of the cables themsevles - and their expected repair times.
There were also several presentations recapping how the connectivity of research and education networks in the region was affected. The key thing that came through for me was that the increased connectivity between countries in the region - the new-ish TEIN2 network is a big factor here - really prevented any one country from being totally cut off (at least for long).
Mostly, things worked as they should and traffic found other available routes around the outages. But there were several hiccups. Particularly, some of the filters that networks had in place, prevented some automatic re-routing. And the date of the event - 26 December - meant that in cases where some sort of higher-level policy decision was needed to allow one network to do something in aid of another, were delayed a bit.
Traffic was re-routed via Hawaii, in particular, to help patch things together.
Since the earthquake, a couple of new cables have been announced for Asia -- with empahsis on not going through the same strait south of Taiwan where the concentration of cables resulted in this large-scale impact.
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