Telecommunications across Asia were slowly being restored on Thursday after earthquakes off Taiwan damaged cables and knocked thousands offline, but access in parts of South Korea and Taiwan was still patchy.

Most of Asia’s telephone traffic was restored while Internet access in many countries had also improved, a day after businesses and home users from Seoul to Sydney were hit by one of the most widespread tech disruptions in Asia.

South Korea’s top fixed-line and broadband operator KT Corp. said six submarine cables owned by a consortium of telecoms firms had been disconnected on Wednesday, knocking out thousands of telephone and broadband connections.

KT Corp. restored most of the telephone services but broadband services for some clients, including banks and the country’s foreign ministry, remained unavailable.

“As of late Wednesday, we were told that broadband services to 32 clients were affected,” a KT spokesman said on Thursday.

Local media reported that 36 foreign bank branches in South Korea had been affected. Citibank Korea, which lost almost all of its international services on Wednesday such as Intranet and phone banking, restored most services later in the day, a spokeswoman said.

KT and other regional operators have warned that fixing all of the affected cables could take at least a few weeks and are working to find ways to run the traffic through other live lines.

The earthquake — of a magnitude 7.1 according to the U.S. Geological Survey — struck off Taiwan’s southern coast at 1226 GMT on Tuesday, killing two people.

But by Thursday, business in the tech-savvy region appeared to be suffering from fewer disruptions. Stock markets in Seoul and Taipei both opened higher on Thursday, although regional trade has been lackluster ahead of the New Year holidays.

In Taiwan, some telephone services had been restored, although international access was shaky, and early morning Internet access also appeared to be working normally. Foreign exchange dealers said trading services were also back to normal.

PCCW Ltd., Hong Kong’s dominant fixed-line and broadband provider, said it would take days to recover lost capacity but did not provide details.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore, the city-state’s central bank, said trading on Wednesday had been conducted over the telephone instead of the e-bond platform although overall volumes are typically low at this time of the year.

Analysts said the disruption highlighted the fact that most of the region’s cable networks are running in the same direction, along earthquake-prone geographic lines.

“People will start to say we can’t let this happen again,” said Frank Dzubeck, president of Washington DC-based telecoms consultancy Communications Networks Architects.

“The issue here is parallelism, you’ve really got to have multiple paths. You can’t lay all the cables in the same place.”

Dzubeck added that the Internet bust in 2001 had hit expensive plans by various companies to lay undersea cables along new paths that were less likely to be affected by earthquakes.

Earthquakes occur frequently around Taiwan and Japan, which lie on a seismically active stretch of the Pacific basin.

TRAFFIC DIVERTED

Several Fortune 500 firms in Singapore, Southeast Asia’s financial center, were affected by the disruption on Wednesday, with Internet access completely down or slowing to a crawl.

“It’s getting better because more traffic is being diverted to other cables right now,” said a spokesman at StarHub, Singapore’s second-largest telecoms firm.

Singapore Telecommunications, Southeast Asia’s top phone company also said services were progressively being restored, and that it was working closely with the submarine cable consortium members.

Malaysia’s dominant phone company, Telekom Malaysia, said it was also working closely with other Asian telecoms firms to repair the damaged submarine cables.

“International call services to countries including Taiwan, Japan, China, Hong Kong, Korea and the U.S. have been affected,” Telekom Malaysia said in a statement late on Wednesday.

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