[outages] Power loss at CAT Towers, Bangkok Thailand

[Dobbins, Roland]

On Nov 30, 2013, at 5:12 PM, Sajal Kayan <sajal83 at gmail.com> wrote:

> "CAT-IIG" is down for sure. Not sure if any of the others are located in the same building or not.

Anti-government protestors in Bangkok, Thailand, apparently unaware that their own Internet media, television, and social media use would be negatively affected, shut off electrical power to the main Communications Authority of Thailand (CAT) IDC & PoP in the Bangrkak district of Bangkok, and also removed the control system for on-site generators and UPSes serving the facility.  Thousands of Thai Web sites and international Web sites hosted in Thailand are currently unavailable, including major corporate sites such as thaiairways.com; the CAT-run International Internet Gateway (IIG) peering PoP has also been affected, leading to disruption of network peering between participating Thai ISPs and other ISPs operating outside Thailand.  Thai ISPs with private and international peering retain global Internet connectivity, albeit with some latency-induced performance issues resulting from longer topological paths for Internet traffic.

It has been communicated to protest leaders that these actions are counterproductive, given that the protestors themselves are heavily using Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, LINE, and other social media in order to coordinate their activities.  CAT report that they will have new emergency generators deployed within the hour, with police reinforcements to prevent further interruptions of service.

Pro-government political activists have stated that they are mobilizing ~20,000 supporters (it is important to note that numbers of people are routinely exaggerated by all political groups in Thailand) in order to guard the CAT facility against renewed intrusions by protestors.


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Roland Dobbins <rdobbins at arbor.net> // <http://www.arbornetworks.com>

	  Luck is the residue of opportunity and design.

		       -- John Milton