Hello, Australia, are you there?

It was connection chaos for millions of Internet users yesterday - and to think we never noticed. Millions of people in Australia, Asia, America and Europe found it difficult, no impossible, to get onto the Net, after a 39,000km-long undersea cable was severed, possibly by a trawler, in the wee hours of yesterday morning (Brit time), somewhere near Singapore.

Worst affected was Australia where, according to AFP wire reports, gridlock became "so bad that the (PTT) Telstra system jammed".

At "the height of the crisis", only 30 per cent of Telstra's ISP infrastructure was operational. It's now running at 70 per cent. So much for network latency.

Expect slow service to Australian Web sites for the next few days then, while repairs get underway. ®