Here at Renesys, we've almost come to expect that natural disasters will be immediately reflected in changes to Internet routing. We've certainly seen that in events such as Hurricane Katrina and the Taiwanese earthquakes. So it was with some surprise that neither the earthquakes in Sichuan province in central China or the Myanmar cyclone registered so much as a blip on our Internet radar.
We currently geo-locate 3 networks (prefixes) to Myanmar and over 2000 to Sichuan province. Over the course of these unfortunate tragedies, we have seen only a normal level of network instability or outages. In the case of China, since the large providers into the country tend to do a good job aggregating prefixes, visibility into the behavior of smaller prefixes only comes from having in-country sources of data. But even our Chinese peers show nothing abnormal with respect to Sichuan networks. Hopefully the apparent lack of damage to the communications infrastructure in these areas will help speed relief efforts.
