Friday, a Taiwanese telephone company said that seven undersea cables linking Asian nations were damaged due to seabed movements, which are believed to have occurred by Typhoon Morakat. This also led to disruption in Internet and telephone services.

It was forwarded by Taiwan's Chunghwa Telecom, which jointly operates four cables in the Bashi Channel between Taiwan and the Philippines that since the typhoon pummeled Taiwan last weekend, the service has been rather slow. It assured that Voice calls and Internet data traffic will be fully restored soon.

In the meantime, two of the Philippines' largest telecommunications providers expressed that since Wednesday, their international call and broadband services have suffered partial disruptions due to the damaged undersea cables connecting China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines.

An official at Chungwa, Chen Hui-yen, explained that the disturbance to communications had been controlled as the Internet traffic and voice calls were re-routed to different cable networks.

Many international Internet data and telephone calls are transmitted as pulses of light via undersea fiber-optic cables that interweave the globe. Most of the cables have "redundancy", which is a technical term meaning to have a backup cable that takes over if the main cable is damaged or completely fails.

In the month of December 2006, an earthquake off the coast of southern Taiwan destroyed seven undersea cables and interrupted services for several days; however, this time round, there were no such reports of seismic activity.

Singapore Telecommunications Ltd., Southeast Asia's largest telephone company, explained that 95% of its Internet capacity has been restored by using other cable systems.